Tons of Important Material Today!

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line, should be our last low quality program.

Image, most people would say it's low quality on a regular basis, but image anyways, we're supposed to be getting this stuff fixed tomorrow.

I am just, you know, like recently I tackled some bike maintenance stuff I've never tried to tackle before because the bike stores are just so busy.

And it took, you know, seven times longer than the videos said it would take. You know, there's all this stuff that say, well, you don't even need tools for this.

Yes, you do. I had to buy the special tool to do that. What are you talking about? You know, that kind of stuff.

So I have that feeling about fixing anything. And so we're supposed to get it fixed tomorrow.

We'll see. We could be doing this from home for weeks in the future for a while.

No, I don't know. Anyway, so this just hit, yet another judge tells

Grace Community Church they cannot meet inside, they can only meet outside and wearing masks and doing all the rest of the submit to Big Brother stuff that they're doing.

Despite the growing amount of information about all of the stuff.

So we'll see what happens on Sunday again. We'll see what happens on Sunday again.

That's interesting. Real quick, this also, I just ran into this.

Yesterday, the story hit that this picture of Joe Biden and his son,

I'm not sure if the son had died, probably was, I don't know. But this picture of Joe Biden with his, holding his son as a child, so this is years and years ago, the child is wearing a knit cap because some of you live in places where it's actually cold enough to wear stuff like that.

And when CNN published it, they Photoshopped it because someone looked up the original picture.

It was a Washington Redskins football cap. And so it had the Washington Redskins logo right there.

They removed it. They removed it. This is, it is seriously like either they've never read 1984 and so they're just following all of its stuff out of stupidity, or they did read it and said, this is great, let's do this.

But 1984 needs to be put into the Doudro Canon because it's prophetic.

And these, so another one just hit. University of Rhode Island to remove

World War II murals due to lack of diversity. So there are murals of like D -Day invasion and stuff like that, but they need to be taken down because of a lack of diversity.

University of Rhode Island recently announced plans to remove two murals depicting the events of World War II due to their lack of diversity.

The decision was prompted after students complained that the mural was not compatible with the university's values of inclusivity.

According to the school's Vice President of Student Affairs, some of our students have even shared with us they didn't feel comfortable sitting in that space.

So the people who died so you would not have to live under Hitler's rule, we can ignore them because you don't feel safe sitting in this space because you have the mental development of a two -year -old.

I'm really getting sick and tired of this. When did we let the children take over?

It's not just the children who are the students. It's the children who are the administrators.

If you are so immature that you don't feel comfortable sitting in that space, as if you think your comfort is what the world's about, you try to raise your children to stop thinking like this as early as possible and to become adults.

No society can survive this. No society can survive this. There's something new coming, folks. There's something new.

And unfortunately, my gut feeling is there's gonna be a period of time where what takes place, see, the

U .S. Constitution requires mature people with a worldview that corresponds to reality.

And the people in these universities, they don't fit. So these kind of people end up under totalitarian rule.

And that looks like what's coming. But it can't last. And so my hope is, hey, let's be long view here, okay?

Long view. Teach your children well and teach your grandchildren well and pass this on so we can build something a whole lot better because, oh my goodness.

Some of our students have even shared with us. That's the only way you can read it. You can't read this as an adult.

Some of our students have even shared with us they didn't feel comfortable sitting in that space.

Okay, so, oh, real quick, sincere.

What do you say when someone loses their home in a wildfire? But Kofi did, and we love

Kofi and we've talked about Kofi a lot. And I've already told Kofi, Kofi, I'm on it.

I'm gonna start surfing eBay. And as soon as you're settled someplace,

I'm replacing the Coogee. So we're good on that. And I've also offered him one of my,

I only have like, what, about three or four of the hardback, God Who Justifies, left from way back when

I was, because that was the only hardback I ever had. So I'm gonna wrap that hardback in a

Coogee. Now, Rich is trying as best he can not to break out laughing in the other room, but Kofi knows,

Kofi has sat on the front row at G3 in that Coogee, okay, that I gave him.

So, yeah, that's right, you are gonna put that microphone down because you would be convicted deep down in your heart if you said anything right now.

That's right, and you know it. Anyway, there was a

GoFundMe page up last night. I'm not sure if it still is because it looked like we were getting to the goal real fast.

I thought that was great, I thought it was wonderful. I put the word out, everybody's been putting the word out. Something tells me that Kofi's gonna be getting lots and lots and lots of books when he gets to where he's going.

Though, I'll be honest with you, this is the one situation where we all sit around and talk about the superiority of the paper book and the beauty of the library.

The problem is it's all paper and it burns. And you can replace a

Kindle a whole lot easier than all those books, it's just the reality. I know, I know, I know, it's the world we live in.

That's the situation. Now, one thing that really is concerning to me is more and more that I'm seeing about a lot of people that are going, you know, like the

Oregon fires are four times worse than they've ever, ever, ever, ever, ever had in as long as we've kept records.

Four times worse. There are a lot of law groups going, it's because they're being started.

It's, hey, if people burn down buildings in inner cities, why won't they start a fire in a forest that is tinder dry during a time when a cold front's going by so you've got lots of wind?

Oh, they've made the threat, they've made the threat many times. And I have a feeling that's probably what's going on.

Can you imagine how evil you have to be to start a fire that wipes out all these people's homes?

And who knows how many lives are gonna be lost in the process? I mean, how evil do you have to be? This is what the left wants to do.

The left wants to destroy this nation. They are all out doing it, all out doing it.

And let me tell you something, this is absolutely, this is just my personal opinion, but I think if you are walking toward an inhabited building, home, anything else with a

Molotov cocktail in your hand, that is assault with a deadly weapon. And I think on any level of meaningful justice, you shoot that person before they can destroy that home, threaten lives, whatever else it is.

This is, without this, we have nothing left. There'll be no hospitals, there'll be no schools, there'll be no, the death toll will be astronomical.

You can't, anarchy is sinful. And that's what these people are.

Didn't the rule used to be, if you loot, they shoot, looters will be shot on sight.

It's not just, you know, threatening somebody's life. It's if you do any of this stuff, you'll be shot. But now you've got public broadcasting, interviewing authors who are writing books about, in defense of looting.

Anyway, yeah, okay. So pray for Kofi, pray for Josh Williamson.

I first met Josh down in Australia, back when I would visit

Australia. Oh my goodness, the stuff going on down there. Did you see, did you see the most recent video?

The woman who is 38 weeks pregnant goes for a walk.

Ladies at that point want to go for walks because they want the baby to come out. They're sick and tired of this.

I remember, I remember very clearly, summer, I heard this walking, this, cause we have gravel.

I know most people outside of Arizona just do not understand this, but we have a gravel lawn. So you can hear people walking across the gravel lawn.

And I remember I could hear, it's one thing to hear it out front cause that sometimes happens, but you never hear anybody walking in your backyard if you've got a gravel lawn.

And so I'm like, what is, I go rushing outside. And it was summer when she was, right toward the end of her pregnancy, she's walking around in the gravel.

Well, just please baby, come, come to mama. Just, just, you know.

So here's this woman, 38 weeks pregnant. And in, and in Australia right now, or at least in Victoria, you can't go five kilometers farther away from your house and you have one hour to exercise per day.

One hour. I'm just like, if you want to see totalitarianism, go to Australia.

The death numbers there are infinitesimal in comparison to lots of other places, but ah, give up all of your, everything just, and, and man, the cops just seem to love it.

She's 38 weeks pregnant. So she sits down on a park bench because she's out of breath. And she's got cops on her like that, robotically saying, there are only certain reasons for you to be out here and this is not one of them and you're not supposed to be sitting up there.

But you're just like, oh my goodness. What happened to humanity?

Oh, what? I, eventually though, they walked off. They didn't arrest her or anything, thankfully.

Eventually they walked off because I think even, even they had to realize, especially when someone started recording them, boy, this is really bad.

We are, we are being real jerks here. This is so obvious. But anyway,

I, okay. But Josh Williamson went from Australia to,

I was told that it's not New Quay, it's New Quay. Why in the world it's spelled that way?

Who knows? It's spelled Q -U -A -Y, but how that becomes

Quay, I have no earthly idea, but I'm sure there's some story somewhere about 600 years ago, they would explain it.

Anyway, in Cornwall, in the Cornwall district of the United Kingdom, we had talked about, oh, there's the

COVID. No, it's not COVID. It was an 80, almost 84 mile bike ride with all the wonderful smoke coming from California.

That's a long tube of air to suck in and I'm still trying to get rid of it.

Anyways, he and I had actually talked about my coming down there and doing something to the church, stuff like that, which would be great to do.

And given how often I was going to London, certainly something I wanted to do, may never happen now.

But as I mentioned in the last program, he made a comment on Facebook about the

Cornwall Pride parade being canceled. Now, just think about this for a moment. In the year 2000, two decades ago, if anyone, if any

Christian minister, now we didn't have Facebook at that point in time, but if any

Christian minister in a sermon had said, we are praying that homosexuality will not be promoted in the streets of our city.

We are praying that young people will not be exposed to the nudity and perverted behavior that is almost always a part of these things.

I have seen pornographic videos. I mean, there were news reports, but they were pornographic videos of the types of things that go on during these gay pride things.

And can you imagine if in a sermon, a minister had said, we are praying that God will protect us from this.

And then it gets canceled. And the pastor goes, thanks be to God.

That's pretty much what Joshua Williamson did, except now we live in a day where everything has changed.

And I think, especially in the United Kingdom, there has been a successful campaign to make regular

British people incredibly guilty and embarrassed about what the

United Kingdom once was. I think it has been a purposeful campaign.

Because it's happening here. It certainly has happened here. The 1619 Project, all the rest of this stuff, it's all meant to say this nation has stunk from the start.

Nothing to ever be proud of. I remember the Bicentennial in 1976.

And man, boy, everybody was celebrating, but we had nothing to celebrate.

We were just pure white privilege. Even all the black people had white privilege back then, evidently, because everybody got together.

And we celebrated 200 years of this thing called the Constitution. Anyway. Really, yeah.

I was just watching it on TV out here in Arizona, but we had just moved here, actually. Anyway, I think that has been very successful in the

United Kingdom. And so even though people know in their hearts that that nation, only a matter of decades ago, would never have allowed this kind of behavior and stood against it, and kings and queens and members of parliament and Spurgeon thundering from his pulpit, they're now embarrassed by all that.

They're embarrassed by all that. And once a people is embarrassed by the very moral essence of what made their nation great, that nation's doomed.

That nation's done. And so here you have

Josh Williamson simply saying what Christians believe and presenting that to some of the leaders from the

Cornwall Pride. Well, you just need to understand something, folks. 20 years ago, homosexuals do not want equal rights.

They want Uber rights. And now everybody says that because everybody sees it all the time.

I started saying that 20 years ago. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nope, nope. Now it's obvious.

And what is happening? But I'm looking at a

Facebook post and now the

Baptist ministers are coming out in support of the homosexuals against Josh daring to take a biblical stand.

Now, not a one of them, not a one of them can provide any meaningful response to the same -sex controversy or anything that Michael Brown's written, certainly anything that Robert Gagnon's written.

They can't, they know it. They don't even try. They don't have to try. They already have the media on their side.

So they didn't engage it. They'll lie about it. They'll say there's nothing in the Bible about this. But they know in their heart of hearts, if we went one -to -one, they would have nothing to say.

They know that. But a number of these guys are in the

Baptist unions. And let me tell you something. One thing I learned as I traveled primarily in Europe is

Baptist unions, when they go bad, they go real bad.

When a Baptist union goes bad, it's like when mayonnaise goes bad, okay? You know, if you don't know it in time or don't smell it, it's going to make you vomit.

It's just, that's what Baptist unions are when they go bad. When they stop having any kind of meaningful connection to the authority of the word of God and stuff like that, it gets ugly.

And they're coming out of the woodwork attacking Joshua Winston. So pray for him because the reality is this is what you live with in the

UK. They're trying to get him kicked out of the country. They're leading boycotts.

They don't want any businesses in the town to have anything to do with anybody involved in that church.

I mean, this is, it's very similar in that context to what our,

Apologia has a church plant in Kauai. Exact same type of tactic.

Isolate, shame. That's why you have to think through it. I've said this multiple times.

When someone says shame on you, you automatically have to be thinking, what is the foundation upon which

I should have any shame in light of what this person is saying? You have to think that type of thing through because these days the shame will be on them because they, just think of it.

If you're standing before the judge of all the earth with this other person and this instance of their saying to you, shame on you is brought before the judge of all the earth, what will the judge of all the earth say?

What will the judge of all the earth say? What will the judge of all the earth say about these Baptist ministers who bear that title but profane the office?

Good question. Josh doesn't have any worry about that, but these ministers who refuse to honor the word of God do.

So that's going on. Keep that issue in prayer as well.

Okay, a couple of days ago, I had the opportunity to listen to Cameron Bertuzzi's video.

I'm not gonna play any of it. I'm just gonna summarize it for you. It caught my attention. I'm not sure how it ended up in my feed and stuff, but it caught my attention because it was on the best argument against Catholicism.

And we know that Cameron Bertuzzi has been playing footsie with Rome and moving that direction very plainly, very clearly.

Had initially when he first started talking about this stuff made it very clear in the comments he was making he really didn't know why he was a

Protestant in the first place, did not have any dedication to the key issues of the Reformation at all.

And so he's the perfect person to be called across the

Tiber River in that sense because he was already paddling around the middle of it anyways, even though he didn't know it. So I was real interested in knowing what he thinks the strongest argument against Catholicism is.

And then he had Jerry Walls on. Jerry Walls, as we know, we've covered a lot of Jerry Walls' stuff on Radio Free Geneva.

I think he's United Methodist, strongly Arminian, very anti -reformed, and hence would not have agreement on the key issues of the

Reformation in regards to the nature of the will of man and issues along those lines.

So I was really interested. And he's written a book promoting the idea of purgatory, not the dogmatically defined

Roman Catholic version of it with indulgences and satispassio and stuff like that, but a sanitized version of the concept of purgatory.

So we're not talking about someone that I would expect to be overly strong in their stance when it comes to the issues of the

Reformation and Roman Catholicism today. So I took it on a ride and I was listening to it and I was amazed.

It's simple. It's been a part of almost every debate we've ever done on the papacy. This is nothing new.

In fact, I remember when we did those debates in 1990, 91 in Austin, Texas with Dr.

Festigi. And one of them had something to do, I had quoted from a

Roman Catholic scholar in one of the debates we did. And during the break, because we did multiple debates, it was in a

TV studio. And during the break, he came over to my desk and we were talking about something and that issue came up and he made the comment.

He said, yeah, there's a lot of guys like that since we stopped the Inquisition. And I was like, do you realize what you just said?

But it was true. It was true. I mean, once there was significantly more enforced harmony as to what opinions you could express.

Anyway, basically Walls had written an article that said that there's all this evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and that's definitional of faith.

And in comparison to that, there's nothing to substantiate the idea of the primacy of Peter in the early church and the concept of apostolic succession in Petrine primacy.

And part of the, and basically what his argument was is that this is the consensus of Roman Catholic scholarship.

Now, I found that interesting because that depends on how you define Roman Catholic scholarship.

Now here's the problem that our Roman Catholic friends have. The problem that Roman Catholic friends have is that there is, look, both on our side and on their side, there is a discernible divide between the bulk of scholarship and the bulk of people who do apologetics.

Now on our side, that's because you got a bunch of liberals and liberals don't do apologetics because they don't really have anything to defend and they don't really believe what the

Bible says anyways. And so why would they be doing apologetics? And we have plenty of conservative scholars that provide meaningful foundations for a defense of all sorts of the key elements of the

Christian faith and the claims of the Christian faith. But the problem that you have for your

Roman Catholic is that there is a very discernible and very clear contrast between Roman Catholic apologetics and Roman Catholic scholarship today.

And that is seen especially and primarily in the Pope. And that's huge.

Even Ratzinger, Benedict, as a greatest scholar as he was, was way on the left, not nearly as left as Francis, but in regards to all sorts of issues, biblically speaking.

And so since Vatican II and even before, the

Popes have been placing on the key elements key Vatican committees, the papal biblical commission and stuff like that, leftist liberal scholars.

Leftist liberal scholars. And so I've pointed out many times, Carl Keating, Catholic Answers.

One of the big things they would do back in the nineties is if you ever listened to that debate they did in Denver when they dodged me, but debated somebody else, the two fundamentalists just were not prepared for that.

One of the things they asked the fundamentalists is how do you know Matthew about Matthew? Well, the problem is the papal biblical commission doesn't believe we have any idea that Matthew about Matthew because the people on it are leftist liberals.

So you've got the apologists giving one answer, whereas the scholars give another answer.

And it's because of the left leaning perspective of the papacy.

And so we both have liberal scholars. There's no question about that. Now, Walls, I think is probably right when it comes to Roman Catholic historians as a whole.

I think you should go to Boston College. I've debated the papacy at Boston College, but you go to Boston College.

And I would imagine the vast majority of those teaching at Boston College chuckle, laugh at the pretentiousness of papal claims, especially historically speaking.

They know about the donation of Constantine, the role that it played.

It was a fraud. They know about the pseudo -Isidorean decretals, frauds. They know that well into this millennium, the papacy was citing fraudulent quotations from early church fathers in support of their position.

They know all that. And one of the issues, and this was one of the primary issues that Walls brought up was the, as he put it, consensus of current scholarship that there was no monarchical episcopate in Rome.

Now he said, until the end of the second century, I thought that was a little overblown. I think that more like midpoint, but that's what he said.

He said the end of the second century. And so he presents this and he says, so clearly, whereas the resurrection defines the

Christian faith, and all Christians believe this, the claims, and of course he's saying this, starting off saying my

Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, and from his perspective, the gospel isn't an issue here.

He may disagree with some things on the outside, but we're pretty much all on the same page there. It's just this authority issue.

It's this papacy issue. So that's where he's coming from.

But he's basically saying there's just, there's a consensus of even Roman Catholic scholarship, historical scholarship, that the concept that Peter had a successor in Rome, and that this was what

Christians understood, and that Jesus had established this, and all the rest of this stuff, it's just a layer of development.

And he's probably right. I would say that that probably is the case.

Now, the dogma of Rome hasn't changed. The dogma can't change.

The dogma has been defined by the Roman Catholic Church, that Jesus established this, that this was understood by the apostles from the start.

This is the faith of the ancient church, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. None of that's true, but that's what's being stated.

And so here you have the contrast between the dogma and the history. So what

I found fascinating is, okay, I agree that there is no question in my mind that that is a good argument.

It's one of many good arguments. The papacy is built upon error.

And the papacy, there are so many problems of papacy.

I don't think that there's, you go back to the debates we did with Jerry Matatick, over seven hours of debating in Denver.

First night at Denver Seminary, second night at the Presbyterian Church locally. Over seven hours worth of debate. Available on Sermon Audio.

At least I'm pretty certain it's available on Sermon Audio. So you listen to that.

Not much has changed. We didn't get overly deeply into that early period as far as the monarchical

Episcopate stuff, but that has been hashed out for quite some time now.

This isn't anything new, all right? This was not new. And I agreed with Walz at least to the point of saying, yeah, this is a very valid argument.

And Roman Catholicism really does not have meaningful responses to this. They have to make stuff up. They got to do a lot of special pleading to make this work.

But then the questions started. Then the questions started. And at one point,

Walz pretty much dismisses Catholic apologists. I think Trent Horn specifically, as being disconnected from their scholars.

There's an element of truth to that depending on how you define scholarship. And obviously Walz takes a pretty wide definition there.

And this is something I've brought up in regards to Roman Catholicism. It primarily has to do with the fact that the dogmas of Rome allegedly can't change, but the world has.

And how Rome interprets those dogmas has, and that creates a conflict with history. There is a fundamental conflict with history.

There's no two ways about it. And you can quote Roman Catholic scholars about the papacy who have a naturalistic bent.

And you have to be honest about that. You have to be straightforward with that. And just like there are

Muslims that will quote our liberals against us. And you point to that. They have people that are less than conservative teaching in their schools and things like that.

I think maybe even worse in some ways, but anyway. So he just dismissed

Catholic apologetics. So when certain Catholic apologists started asking questions,

I was really taken aback because his answers were, Wall's answers were really poor and showed that he really had never done any meaningful interaction with Roman Catholic apologists.

And maybe that's why he just sort of dismissed them. Well, I sit around and have coffee with Roman Catholic scholars all the time.

We're buds. And so why should I worry about these fire brand apologist type guys?

So his answers were surface level or sometimes just didn't even show any understanding at all. And what was really embarrassing was one of the questions was, could you please comment on 2

Timothy 3 .17 in regards to material and formal sufficiency? Now, I'm sorry. If you're going to wander into the area of dealing with Roman Catholicism, you better know exactly how to respond to that right now.

Don't be looking that up in your Bible. If you don't know 2 Timothy 3 .16 -17, if you don't recognize that it is the classical text and the very fact that the question used material and formal sufficiency would be more than enough for anybody who has even marginal knowledge of the apologetic approach to Roman Catholicism and the responses that have been provided.

Don't even have to stop. It was embarrassing. He looked up the wrong

Timothy and then Cameron got confused and they read the wrong verse and eventually they got to 3 .17

and didn't even recognize the connection to 3 .16 and never addressed material and formal sufficiency.

And it was a disaster. It was horrible. But that comes from sipping lattes with your liberal

Catholic professor friends at the seminary and never being challenged to actually engage any of that stuff.

So yeah, that was fascinating. And you could tell that the people in the chat asking questions were both

Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. And hence you could sort of see who was spinning which direction on the questions they were asking.

But again, the question, very valid, very worthwhile.

But the answer's really, really, really bad. All right,

I'm gonna try to get through this. It's gonna be tough. I'm gonna run into the wall here pretty soon. Just, I think my blood sugar levels are gonna just crash and I'm just gonna, and if all of a sudden it just fades to black and the music starts, you'll know what happened that, yeah.

And I don't even have any of my apple cider vinegar stuff today. So I'm just running on plain old cold water, which is good too,

I suppose. I'm sure I'll be rehydrating forever. A couple of weeks ago, a series began to be posted on the

Bible Answer Man blog. I guess that's what it is. No, Siri.

Shut up, Siri. And it involves

Francis Chan, Metropolitan Yohanan, and Hank Hanegraaff discussing the

Eucharist. Now, Jeff Durbin and I have talked about doing a real nice quality response to this, especially on the issue of the

Eucharist. I told him recently, he has his MDiv now, so he survived these hours and hours and hours of oral examination.

So he can just do all this by himself now. He doesn't need me around. But he thought it might be fun,

I guess, to have another person to, so he's not talking all the time. Anyway, the issues of the early church and the

Lord's Supper and the real presence of Christ and the development of the doctrine of transubstantiation and the relationship of the teaching of the

New Testament on the Supper to that of the relationship to atonement, hence to soteriology, all of these are vitally important things.

And they are things that we have addressed many times in the past, and they're part of what

I would address regularly in teaching church history. And I can't tell you how many times

I've pointed out to people, you don't even get to your first full -blown treatise on the atonement until the fourth century.

There are all sorts of theories on the atonement. This is very important in understanding the development of various perspectives and viewpoints in the early church and in regards to Eucharistic celebration and what it meant and things like that.

And there were many different viewpoints. There were all sorts of nuances and a lot of people near the church assumed everybody believed just like they did, which was easy to do.

You didn't have the level of communication, the speed of communication that we would have today.

And so it's very worthwhile to discuss the issue.

It's very worthwhile, I think, especially for modern Christians who so often have a liturgy.

We all have a liturgy, whether you know you have a liturgy or not. The more you know that you have a liturgy, the more careful you can be in analyzing it for being biblically consistent and harmonious with the message you're preaching and things like that.

But we all have a liturgy, and unfortunately, the vast majority of evangelical liturgies are just developed on a whim.

What works, what looks best with our color of pews, whatever else it might be.

And certainly there is therefore reason to discuss the decline in focus upon the

Lord's Supper, lamentable decline that I've preached on numerous times over the years, and I can document that.

And preached on just recently at the end of 2019, right before the end of civilization as we know it.

Anyway, so there's good reason for us to be trying to find the time to do that.

But as I listened to this, and as I listened to this beginning portion, where Francis Chan has sort of kicked things off, and now

Hank's doing his thing. It was just, it's just so sad to me, because I've sat, starting in the 90s, over 10 appearances on the

Bible Answer Man broadcast, and I don't mean just 10 as in 10 times.

I mean, normally when I would be on, I'd be on for two, three hours at a time, so that's two or three programs.

So actually it was many more than that. All the way through the attempted ambush with George Bryson, which

I knew was going to be the end of my relationship to CRI and to Hank Hanegraaff, and it was.

That came from the other side. That was their choice. But I could tell by what had happened in that particular instance.

I mean, I was never on again, and I knew I was never gonna be on again. But I debated

Tim Staples on there. I debated Jimmy Akin on there. So we dealt with Roman Catholic issues a number of times.

Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, these things like that. So to know that Hank denies these things today as the quote -unquote

Bible Answer Man, in a way that Walter Martin would have caused him to roll over in his grave, is a sad thing.

I do not rejoice in providing this response to Hank's comments, but I have to.

I have to respond to his comments. And so what we need to do is we need to listen to what Hank has to say and then point out the errors because Hank presents this with a level of confident authority that church history should not be giving him if he were really familiar with it.

And it really impacts view of scripture and what he says about scripture.

Now he's gonna start off talking about the centrality of the church, which is wonderful on a certain level.

Problem is, and I'm not trying to be mean or anything here, I just need to point out that this is how people end up converting.

Hank was never a churchman when I knew him. He was never a churchman.

And what I mean by churchman, I'm a churchman. I've functioned as an elder in a church majority of my adult life.

And I'm deeply involved in the life of the church and preaching. I'll be preaching this

Sunday at Apology of Church. I'll be preaching on the Big Three and on John 3 .16,

Objections to Reform Theology. So that's what I'm gonna be doing on Sunday. Involved with the church.

And that just wasn't where Hank was. Hank had his thing, and like most apologists, that did not involve the church in that way.

So now this swing to where the church is everything is interesting to observe.

And it's interesting in the impact that it ends up having in the view of scripture as well. So here is

Hank Hanegraaff. You can see the conversation here.

Let's listen in. With respect to church history, I think that we have to, first of all, look at the centrality of the church.

In church history, the church was the epicenter of everything. It was the epicenter of the universe.

And why is that? It is because Paul, in his didactic epistle, 1

Timothy chapter three, says that the church is the ground and the pillar of truth.

I'm sitting here thinking, if I just play this and then go back, we're gonna be here long past my energy levels that will allow me to do so.

Okay? So I will need to stop, start. 1 Timothy 3, 15.

I just happen to have this sitting here. Yeah, yeah. Pillar and foundation of the truth.

We're supposed to be getting these, right? They've been up there, but you haven't ordered our batch.

This is the old version. There's supposed to be a new version. This is what we passed out. This is a special lightweight version.

At least that's what we told people when they were walking to the mass at Cherry Creek State Park in Colorado without masks on.

That was back in the old days of freedom and liberty and things like that. This is what we passed out to people.

And this has a whole discussion of this particular issue.

We went over it on various Bible Answer Man broadcasts as well.

But 1 Timothy 3 is talking about the local church, not the universal church. It's talking about how a person is to behave in that local church.

This is Paul giving Timothy instructions as to what's to be happening in the local church.

And the church is the pillar and foundation, which is, what does a pillar and foundation do?

It holds something else up. It holds something else up. So it's not the definition of truth itself.

It's holding something else up. So to translate the text that is talking about how the local church, because the highest positions in the

New Testament are elders in a local church. There are no patriarchs. There are no metropolitans.

None of that stuff did the apostles have any idea of. And to establish those things, you've got to get rid of Sola Scriptura.

And that's what Hank has done. Hank does not believe in Sola Scriptura any longer. That is very plain, very clear. Eastern Orthodoxy doesn't believe in it.

He's the Eastern Orthodox Answer Man now. So he doesn't believe in Sola Scriptura. I don't think you should use a title that was started by people who firmly defended

Sola Scriptura, personally, but there you go. That's where it is.

So anyway, so 1 Timothy 3, the church is absolutely central because it is the body of Christ.

But the church holds up the truth and as the bride of Christ wants to hear the voice of Christ and does not confuse her voice with his.

That's a vital thing to keep in mind. The church, if you look at early church history, that gave us the

Bible. Without the church, we would not have the Bible. People think that the

Bible fell out of the sky. You know, many people think that the King James Version 1611 is an autograph.

It fell out of the sky, hot off the porch. Same part used. Yeah, exactly.

But the truth of the matter is there was no Bible in the church.

There wasn't a Bible in the church. This is so false that it is astonishing that anyone who reads any history could ever say this.

I am truly amazed at how many times

I hear people say this who are seeking to find a way to subjugate scripture to extra scriptural traditions.

You clearly do not read the early church fathers to say these words. Every one of the earliest writings we have, the

Didache, the Epistle to Diognetus, Clement, Ignatius, filled with biblical citations.

Where'd they get it from? Well, they had something called the Greek Septuagint.

Oh yeah, sure. They had the Hebrew too. Where'd I put it?

There she is. I knew it was down here somewhere. I do not have with me my

Jeffrey Rice rebinds. They're at home in a fireproof safe. But this is the little hand version of the

Greek Septuagint. It's a great translation of the Old Testament. This is probably too small for... As long as I get my head back,

I can... This was the Bible of the early church. This was written 400 years.

Well, okay, the texts were written, finished 400 years before Christ. This was translated, the

Greek Septuagint was translated about 200 years before Christ. And this is the Bible of the early church.

So what are these people talking about? Well, yeah, but you got the

New Testament canon issues. Well, you've got Old Testament canon issues too. And when did the church, quote unquote, solve those issues, even though she always functionally had this?

From Rome's perspective, not until the 15th century. And there really isn't, as soon as you start asking specific questions like that of orthodoxy, orthodoxy just goes tilt because that's the type of thing that orthodoxy says is in the liturgy, but it's not something where you can give a date, counsel.

Now, Hank's going to do it and he's going to be wrong about it in just a second. But anyway, but when you are told that the church gave us the

Bible, the Protestant Reformation said the Bible gave us the church. The Bible gave us the church.

That is because this is the anustos, this is divine in nature, and it reveals to us what the function and purpose of the church is to be.

And therefore the church is always under the authority of what is the anustos because she herself is not the anustos.

But Rome says the other way around, and evidently Antioch does too, or Constantinople or whatever terminology you want to use for Eastern Orthodoxy.

So here's the former Bible Answer Man saying the church, which you would now identify historically, spatially, temporally with Eastern Orthodoxy, gave us the

Bible. Whereas that early church and everything we read of her, she's quoting from what she has already received, and that is the

Greek Septuagint. Now, he might say, well, but the early church is involved in recognizing the canon, not creating the canon.

Well, he would say creating the canon, but we would say recognizing the canon. That's true, just like the Old Testament people were used in the same way in the 400 years leading up to Christ.

That didn't make the Jewish magisterium infallible, did it? That's always the question that anybody struggles to answer is how you escape that particular conundrum.

So as soon as you hear somebody saying this, they just don't, they aren't reading the early fathers themselves. That's the funny thing, because Hank's into all the reading

Greek and all the rest of that stuff. I've taught development of Tristic theology from the

Greek texts themselves, and it is plainly evident that this is what they're using.

And they have no concept that this somehow has been derived from them. It comes from God.

In fact, the Bible was not codified as the 27 books of the

New Testament canon that we enjoy today. Until 367, it was codified formally by Athanasius.

Now, I almost rode off the road. I almost rode off the road when

I heard this, I'll be honest with you. The first thought I had was Athanasius would be stunned.

Athanasius would be stunned to learn this. What he's talking about, we've talked about this for years.

It's a standard part of teaching church history. He's talking about the 39th

Festal Letter, 367, and Athanasius, as the Bishop of Alexandria, has the responsibility of sending this out.

Now, by, that's over halfway through the fourth century. By this point in time, not only do you have monarchical episcopates, but now you're developing, once you start building unbiblical offices, they just multiply.

They just multiply on top of each other. And so once you've got bishops, a singular bishop over an entire city, then you get into a whole region and you end up having to have somebody who's above all those bishops in that region.

And so you see, for example, the Council of Nicaea, you see when you read the sixth canon, Council of Nicaea, that there already is the idea of giving authority to certain bishops over certain areas.

The Roman bishop not being given primacy over the entire church, he's just one of these people.

They're given authorities, and as is the Bishop of Alexandria. So Athanasius, who had become bishop after the

Council of Nicaea, Alexander had died shortly thereafter, and was well -beloved there because of his consistency during the

Arian resurgence for decades, where he's kicked out of Alexandria five times, but refuses to compromise and is victorious in the end.

And it's interesting, it just struck me. I was just thinking about the article that I wrote about Athanasius, Athanasius' contramundum, et cetera, et cetera, that the

Roman Catholics were so upset about. You know where it was initially published? The CRI Journal.

That was for the CRI Journal, yeah. Yeah. I would invite

Hank to go back and read his own journal on that one, because it's rather relevant. Anyway, so it was his duty each year to send out this pastoral letter.

And it basically was making sure that everybody was celebrating various feast days at the same time, because that was a big issue in the early church.

I mean, the Court of Deciman controversy in the second century, and Victor, and Irenaeus, and it was considered a scandal when you have people celebrating the resurrection on different days.

And so, because of that, there was the need to have consistency.

And you couldn't look it up online. There was no Google. This was the old version of, okay,

I've got Athanasius' letter around here someplace that will tell me when we're supposed to be doing anything. And in writing them, because it's called the 39th

Festal Letter, so there were 38 before, in writing these letters, he would also take opportunity to address pressing issues in regards to the life of the church.

And it happens to be that in that 39th Festal Letter, Athanasius addresses authoritative books, because the reality is that there were books that were being promoted in various parts of the

Roman Empire, which is beginning to crumble, but still in existence at this point.

There are people who are promoting various books that are not promoted elsewhere.

And there are people questioning certain books as well. This was the historical reality.

There were no golden indices that just popped down out of heaven. And so Athanasius gives a listing, and it's interesting to see what things looked like in 367 in Alexandria, both with the

Old and New Testaments, in regards to, for example, what books are in what we call the

Septuagint today. Suppose the differences between the

Alexandrian and Palestinian canons, which don't really exist, but they're discussed.

And the so -called apocryphal or deuterocanonical books, which were translated into Greek, Augustine thought they were a part of the

Greek Bible. Not getting into all this stuff right now, but the point is there were reasons to address this, and the same thing with what we call today the

New Testament. The vast majority of the

New Testament, there wasn't any question. You're told all the time that they have all these different gospels.

Yeah, there were small little outbreaks of somebody promoting the gospel of Peter over here or something like that, but Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they're the only meaningful candidates for anything in as far as history is concerned.

So here's the point. Athanasius did not believe that he had some kind of sacerdotal power to define the canon for the entire church, nor do you think that's what he was doing.

He was providing guidance, guidance that would have been based upon practice for decades before that.

He certainly would be the person to look to for this, given how many times he had had to go traveling because the

Romans were chasing him around during the Arian resurgence. And so he sort of had this finger on the pulse of more than just where he was from.

And he, of course, had communication with people from many other areas as well.

And so if someone had told Athanasius when he wrote the 39th

Vessel of the Lord, did you know you are defining for the first time the very canon of scripture for the entire church?

You would have gone, what are you talking about? I'm giving practical advice in light of questions

I've received. I'm not a counsel. I can't create canon.

Canon's reflective of inspiration. God did that when he inspired scripture. What are you talking about?

And so when I hear something like this, I just go, wow, okay.

I mean, I'm not gonna go back and listen to all the times I was on the Bible Lancer Man broadcast, but I would not be surprised if this was addressed at some point in time.

Rich says he's remembering something, which at his age is a very good thing. Obviously means he's been taking his

Prevagen. Oh, zing, boom, wow.

Well, the theme music says we're leaving now or somebody else is leaving now.

Here. He says his name's not

Joe. I'll let you figure out the rest of that one. Anyway, having some fun there.

Let's go back to some faux church history here. Letters circulating throughout the churches, but formally codified by Athanasius.

And by the way, Athanasius was the one who fought the Arian heresy.

He was the one who said Athanasius against the world. He was willing to stand against the world for the deity of our

Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Which of course was the substance of the article

I wrote for the CRI Journal and then made the application that he stood against church councils.

He would not sign the Arianized Sirmium Creed. But the reason he was, it was

Athanasius' contramundum. And I don't think that's what Athanasius described himself. There's others that described him that way.

But the reason that that phraseology developed was he's the one who himself said scripture is sufficient for all things.

So he stood against for years, the large majority, pretty much everybody, gave in to Arianism.

He didn't, he kept arguing from the basis of scripture, not tradition, scripture.

And that's what God used to vindicate that truth. I sort of think that's relevant.

I've made that argument more than once, including in the pages of the CRI Journal. So the

Bible then is codified and it takes centuries, quite frankly, before those codified books become prevalent in the

Eucharistic assemblies. The Eucharistic assemblies. Well, I understand what he means by that.

It's obviously not a biblical phrase. That's not something that the early church used to describe themselves as Eucharistic assemblies.

But if he's trying to say that a large portion of the biblical text was unknown in these churches, that's just baloney.

That's just, what are you reading? Get yourself a version of Clement, for example, that puts the font in some other form so you can see citations from the

Old Testament, because they're all over the place. And New Testament books, for that matter.

And when it comes to New Testament books, there's only a few that take time to become widely accepted.

Revelation and some of the super teeny tiny 2 John, 3 John, 2

Peter, maybe Jude type books. But the major books, the

Pauline Epistles and hence Justification by Faith, Acts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, no, no question about them at all.

And they are being quoted long, long before Athanasius. They are functioning at the

Council of Nicaea as the foundation for the argumentation. And anyone who's read

Tertullian or anybody in the second and third centuries knows that these books are already viewed as scripture.

Yes, sir. The Prevagen kicked in again? The Council of Nicaea did not take up the issue of the

Canon of Scripture. In fact, only regional councils touched on this issue, Hippo in 393, Carthage 397, until much later.

On and on and on. You know what I'm reading from right now? Equip .org article,

What Really Happened at Nicaea by you. I know. It's right there on the -

Oh, I know. I know. I know. Well, he didn't say Nicaea had anything to do with it. Yeah.

Oh, I know. I know. I know. Throughout the then known world.

So you look at many, many centuries of church history in which there is no

Bible. That is just, Hank, how can you? That is embarrassing.

It's absolutely embarrassing. And Francis Chan, what are you doing sitting there and you don't go,

Hank, at your suggestion, I've been reading some of the early church fathers and they're soaked in scripture.

What do you mean there is no Bible? Well, formally codified. So what?

Are you seriously suggesting that scripture was not functioning in Tertullian, in Clement, Ignatius, Irenaeus?

I mean, have you read Irenaeus, Hank? Have you read Against Heresies? Have you read the amazing job he did in describing the

Gnostic religion? Have you noticed that he does know what scripture is and he utilizes it? Is this, this is a serious argument here that until there is absolute unanimity on third

John that nobody in the early church quoted from Romans? Mark, James, what?

I mean, this is embarrassing. And the only thing that drives this in my experience is when you're trying to promote another authority that you need to have to establish the argumentation that you're going to be making.

And that argumentation that you're going to be making is about Eucharistic celebration. And because you're not going to be getting it from scripture, you've got to subjugate scripture and say, well, the church had these apostolic traditions, these traditions, this liturgy, et cetera, et cetera, depending on whether you're

Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, what you're trying to prove, whatever it is. I'm just,

I'm floored by what I'm reading here. It's right here on Hank's website. His unwillingness to give place even when banished by the emperor, disfellowshipped by the established church and condemned by the local councils ambitious of light gave rise to the phrase

Athanasius Contramundum, Athanasius against the world, convinced that scripture is sufficient. Above all things,

Athanasius acted as a true Protestant in his day. Athanasius protested against the consensus opinion of the established church and did so because he was compelled by scriptural authority.

That's what got Patrick Madrid and everybody at Catholic Answers so angry, is that phrase.

And I would suspect should get Hank just as angry now. Well. Because it flies right in the face.

Well, now that we do this program, it probably will. It'll probably take it down now. Probably will, never be seen again.

You might want to grab a copy of it while you're at it. No, I'm absolutely serious. You might want to grab a copy of it while you're at it.

But no, it was that phrase. And if I recall correctly, there's a footnote on that phrase. And the footnote goes to Mike Porter.

I said, I credit one of my students because I think Mike was taking, Mike took classes at Grand Canyon for like 25 years.

Longest term student ever. And I seem to recall one of the classes that I was teaching, it might've been church history, but one of the classes

I was teaching when I was scholar in residence there. And that was what caused the whole thing with the white man's burden and this rock magazine and the whole nine yards was that.

But yeah, that's the reality. So yeah. And you just find that so amazingly ironic.

Yeah. I'm not saying that Hank had to read his own stuff, but maybe he should, yes.

Well, God has not ceased working. He's worked through the church, the Holy Spirit working through the church.

Okay, so there's the key issue. Did you catch that? Let me, I broke that up and I apologize.

It's here. And many, many centuries of church history in which there is no

Bible. Well, God has not ceased working. He's worked through the church.

The Holy Spirit working through the church is continuing to communicate truth.

The truth, not only of scripture, but a proper understanding of that scripture.

And you can kind of... Okay, so here, you need, this is important. We need to catch this, okay? So what you do is you cast doubt on the canon of scripture outside of the authority of a church, in this case,

Athanasius' decision, evidently. And then you say, all these centuries go by, but the spirit was still active during this time, right?

And so the spirit is communicating truth in scripture and the interpretation of scripture.

Now, Rome does this by saying there are these apostolic traditions that are passed down orally.

Eastern Orthodoxy does this through the concept of the liturgy. The liturgy and prayers of the church are the outworking of the ministry of the

Holy Spirit amongst the people of God. And hence, as it really comes into...

Orthodoxy tends to chafe when you point out that her traditions are pretty much eighth century, eighth, ninth century.

She wants to say, no, they're all apostolic. They just happen to be seen with the greatest clarity by some of the great writers of that time period.

The rise of Islam causes a clarification of things, which is true, by the way.

But the idea being, it goes back to apostolic tradition. But the idea is the living spirit in the living church produces liturgy and prayer that becomes the matrix in which the scripture is to be interpreted.

This is the Orthodox denial of Sola Scriptura. And it's different than the

Roman denial of Sola Scriptura, which provides a functional, technically non -revelatory, but in light of what has been defined by the church since then, plainly is revelatory, categories of this oral tradition that allegedly should have a historical existence to it.

As is always the case, the Orthodox understanding is significantly less concrete, which is why

I have sat in this chair for a number of years now and said we're not going to get into all this and we just keep getting dragged into it one way or another.

But what you're hearing is the Orthodox denial of Sola Scriptura.

And I think one of the reasons we're seeing, we go through cycles of this, and once you get my age, you get used to seeing the up and down.

And you don't get all excited about it. Other people do, they haven't seen this before. But I think that's why we're seeing the current interest in Orthodoxy amongst reformed people and stuff like that.

And you always get your converts and it's, you know, until you've been doing something for 25, 30 years,

I'm not impressed. Once you're consistent for that long, great.

But once you've seen as many people go this direction, that direction that I have, that's why you eventually end up really honoring consistency over time, okay?

Anyway, I think one of the reasons that we've got this current uptick is because not only are people not familiar with the categories and practice of Eastern Orthodoxy, but when you hear, the way

I just expressed it sounds sort of cool. I mean, it does. I mean, and there are elements of truth to the continuing presence of the spirit in the church, the intimate connection that is to exist there, the reality that Christ is building

His church and therefore we can learn from those who've come before us but that's totally different functionally.

Then the idea that scripture does not can, scripture cannot function as a reforming objective source of divine truth that corrects the church.

Once you have the Eastern Orthodoxy, the biggest problem Eastern Orthodoxy is it can't be reformed. It can't be reformed.

It is encrusted in eighth and ninth century tradition which has become the only possible lens for the interpretation of anything, including scripture.

And so the voice of the bridegroom is now completely confused the voice of the bride and you can't distinguish between the two and therefore you can't have correction.

That's why solo scripture is so important. You can't have reformation. The idea being, well, you'd never need it because the spirit won't lead you into these errors and that's the problem in not recognizing that in this life, the church is going to have all sorts of false sons within her pale.

And so there's gonna be need for reformation. You need to have a clear, you need to have clear access to the voice of Christ in his church.

And once you, in essence, bury that voice by marrying it with the voice of tradition, you become encrusted and stuck.

And that's where orthodoxy is. That's where orthodoxy is. Now in America, they use that as a positive thing because they look at evangelicals who have no historical foundation at all, have no appreciation of the fact that Christ has been building his church at all.

And they use that then just like Roman Catholicism likewise uses the allure of the ancient church staying in the midst of time, unchanged, so on and so forth, until you start digging in and find out where the changes have actually been.

Then things change. Go try to get this done. Get this just by common sense.

You think, for example, if I'm a Latin living in Rome, speaking a different language from secular

Koine Greek, the street language of the day, it's going to be harder for me to understand what the apostles had in mind than if you are geographically close speaking the same language.

Well, you think about the early church. You had Jesus Christ. He took 12 men that they should be with him, and he communicated truth to them.

And then they, in turn, to other people. You had the apostolic fathers. You had the holy fathers.

And then you had the churches that disseminated throughout the world. Well, the apostolic fathers were not removed from the apostles.

They were contemporaries of the apostles. You think of Polycarp. Polycarp famously said, "'Eighty and six years

I have served him. "'Will I now deny the Lord has saved me?' And he went down in flames. He was martyred.

Ignatius of A... By the way, just in passing, yeah, that's what has come down to us in tradition.

Concerning Polycarp, did he say those words? Really hard to...

You need to be careful because there's a lot of hagiography, the

Elevation of Saints, and there's just tons of literature that scholars would recognize involves the insertion of words in the mouths of those who came earlier.

And so you just... I mean, I've read that portion of the martyrdom of Polycarp in my classes many, many times, and it's very touching, challenging, but there's always that recognition that we're outside of scripture here and there are elements to the story that seem to warn us that not all is historically accurate here, shall we say, just in passing.

Then he goes on to Ignatius. They were contemporaries of Peter and John. Now you look at...

Well, John maybe, probably not Peter. Peter's death is much earlier than John's would be, but just, again.

Their dissemination of the truths of the church to a next generation, the

Holy Fathers, and on it goes, and the church continues to communicate truth.

And remember, he has talked about Ignatius. Biblical citation, vitally important in Ignatius, in Clement, everything, even the...

Some say Clement's first century. Some even say pre -70. Ignatius is plainly right at the beginning of the second century.

None of them are ignoring scripture, they're citing scripture.

Scripture has absolute ultimate authority. Absolute ultimate authority. And remember, it's not till Irenaeus that we get someone claiming apostolic tradition.

Irenaeus gives us apostolic tradition that Jesus was more than 50 years of age, which was a false apostolic tradition.

We have a testament that we can read not only a testament, but two testaments, the

Old Covenant and the New Covenant, which aren't qualitatively different because the only reason that the

New Covenant is better than the Old Covenant is because the New Covenant is the blood of Jesus Christ, which fulfills all the types and shadows that came before.

And therefore, it's better than the blood of bulls and goats. So I'm laying the ground...

And I'm just going to have to say that it also has better promises and a better mediator. There's a whole lot more in Hebrews than just that.

I thought that was a real... I'm not sure if that has something to do with something he's being taught or whatever.

I don't know. But there's a whole lot more to it than that. We're here, Metropolitan Johannan and Francis.

I'm laying the groundwork because it is the church that is the ground and pillar of truth. And so we have to look at what did the church do?

Well, the early church made not a pulpit, but they made the altar, the center of worshiping

God. Now, catch that. Catch that. What church are we talking about?

Remember, there aren't church buildings for a couple hundred years.

And once we have church buildings, it's long after a major shift in viewpoint in church government and things like that.

But yes, they have altars once they appear. But when you look at the

Didache, when you look at the teaching concerning the dissemination of truth, the centrality of Scripture, the preaching of Scripture, what you're hearing here is, well,

I'm laying this foundation and what's going to be promoted here is that the

Eucharistic sacrifice becomes the key element of all

Christian worship over against the preaching and teaching of the Word. That it becomes that which is the essence of the

Spirit's revelation of how unity is. In Eastern Orthodoxy, you're going to hear

Hank talk about Zoe, Energia, life, energy.

There's a mystical aspect of Eastern Orthodoxy that,

I mean, you can find elements in the mystics and things like that in the West, but it is one of the fundamental dividing lines between Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy is this emphasis upon this

Energia and places of energy and the communication of Zoe. And it's not done by preaching

Scripture. That's ancillary to the liturgy of the church and the presence of the

Spirit. So, you know where that's coming from.

The early church uniformly believed that when you partook of the

Eucharist, you were partaking of the real presence of Christ, Jesus. Now, I'm not going to spend much time on this because Jeff and I want to do this, but I wanted you to hear the specificity of the terminology.

Uniform. A number of times in this presentation, Hank basically said, everybody, uniform.

As soon as you hear somebody saying that, you know you're listening to someone who's promoting their modern viewpoints and projecting them onto the early church.

You just know it. Because anybody who honestly approaches church history is faced with the reality of the differing viewpoints that people had, even on common beliefs.

On baptism. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. I've got to, yeah, be right back.

It's over here, and it's a big book, and I don't want to strain something. Here's Everett Ferguson's Baptism in the

Early Church. Okay. If everybody had the same view, this book is too big.

You don't need this many pages if everybody's got the same view. Why wouldn't they have had the same view?

Real simple. Real simple. Is it because the

Bible isn't clear enough, or is it because many of the people who came into the church already had initiatory rites and initiatory food celebrations in the background of their thinking?

And therefore, there is a, hey, has anybody ever heard of the seeker -sensitive movement?

It's nothing new. And so you end up with all sorts of different perspectives.

So the point is, I wanted you to hear, uniform, everybody, you don't read church history fairly or accurately when you say something like that.

I mean, I've often said about the only thing that I know of that all early Christians believe is in monotheism.

But you could have somebody say, yeah, well, look at this over here. This person seemed to be a tritheist or something like that.

Well, we can speak generally. And when you talk about real presence, that has to be defined, doesn't it?

And we know that the reason he's talking real presence, what he means by real presence isn't what

Rome means by real presence. Because Rome defines real presence on the basis of later dogmatic definitions of transubstantiation.

And even he's going to say, we stay out of that. That's talking about the how, and we say it's a mystery.

And we're going to stick with that. Well, okay. Problem is, what happens in the supper is supposed to represent what happened on the cross.

It has to be connected to the gospel. And that's where orthodoxy has failed.

To see the fundamental connection. Where orthodoxy has succeeded, and many in the

West have failed, is to maintain an emphasis upon true incarnational theology.

We see this every Christmas in the West, to be honest with you.

And by the way, the East is probably right on the date of Christmas. Probably are.

They celebrate January 6th. What are the 12 days of Christmas? How many days is it from December 25th to January 6th?

12. That's why there's 12 days of Christmas. So, there's actually evidence that that January 6th date has some validity to it.

What? Why are you? Oh. Well, let me tell you something.

If you're gonna respond to Eastern Orthodoxy, then you've got to respond to what the real issues are.

And unfortunately, almost everybody that I see that responds to it don't respond to the real issues. They just assume

Eastern Orthodoxy is popeless Catholicism. And it isn't. That's not how they think.

That's not how they think. And you've got to recognize when there are things in Eastern Orthodoxy that are very attractive to people.

And the fact that Eastern Orthodox people understand the Trinity is very attractive, because the vast majority of evangelicals don't.

They don't even. Again, again, testify.

I've said this forever and ever, but the vast majority of Protestant evangelicals are not functionally

Trinitarian. Because if the doctrine of the Trinity does not impact you in any meaningful fashion in your life each week, then you're not actually a

Trinitarian. You may confess it when you're asked, but you're not living it. And so you've got to go, hey, does

Eastern Orthodoxy get anything right? Yeah. And one of the reasons they do, let's look at history.

What did I say? I'm going over time, aren't I? What did I say helped clarify traditions in the history of the

Church in the East around the time where these traditions coalesce and become the heart of Eastern Orthodoxy?

The rise of Islam. The rise of Islam. You can't talk about Eastern Orthodox theology without talking about Islam and understanding where Islam is coming from.

So might there be a historical reason why they are functionally

Trinitarian? Because they're living under the heel of Islam? Oh, yeah.

It's just like... Ah, using all my props today.

I'll bet this has it. Yes, of course it does. Everybody has one of these. All right.

Remember this? This is my... Remember these maps in the back of your

Bible where you've got the Mediterranean here? And so you've got, there's Italy and Greece and North Africa and all that kind of stuff.

Remember that? Yeah, Rich is looking at his phone going, where did my maps go? Yeah, that's one of the things you sacrifice.

Take that map, draw a line down the middle of it between Italy and Greece.

East, West. Now, mark the cities that claimed that their churches were founded by an apostle, which become the apostolic sees in the

Western view, the patriarchates in the East. Look at the line.

To the West of the line, one city, Rome. To the

East of the line, numerous cities. Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem.

Now look at the churches that developed. In the West, one patriarch, not patriarch,

Pope obviously becomes the terminology, but one apostolic representative. In the

East, you have collegiality. You're forced to. You have to have leaders working together with other leaders because they are the bishops of apostolic churches.

History has everything to do with all this stuff, but it's good to be accurate in your history.

Unfortunately, Hank has started off on the wrong foot. So when we get into all of the

Eucharistic material, the problem is we've, Hank has started the wrong place and Francis Chan sitting there, not even challenging.

I hope someone will help him to realize he needs to challenge those things. But there you go.

There you go. I hope that that is helpful to all sorts of folks because it's important.

And there you go. All right. So I'm going to pass out now. I hope

I can. Actually, the wife's making this salmon and pasta dish that she made for me a few weeks.

It was really, really good. And so I'm really looking forward to that. I just hope that I make it home before everything falls apart.

I've got some Skittles in the other room, but those probably aren't going to really help him very much. Thanks for watching the program today.

I hope that we're going to be back. 1080,

Rip Roarin'. We can do live call -in shows again, the whole nine yards, because tomorrow it's supposed to get fixed.