May 2, 2006

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us.

Yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence. Our host is Dr. James White, Director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an Elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. This is a live program and we invite your participation.

If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is James White.

Mormonism, Calvinism, and the Limits of FAIR LDS Scholarship

Hey, good morning. Welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a Tuesday morning, 11 o 'clock out here in Phoenix. Might be the first day of many here in the Phoenix area where we are going to see triple digits.

It's possible. I think it's only going to get to 99. I'm being very, very optimistic today, but you never know. It might get a little bit higher than that. We hope not anyways. 877 -753 -3341, I received a note this morning.

I tell you, anyone who can make some of the stuff that we've played recently on The Dividing Line look good, like they have been doing their homework, is not doing too well. I was sent a link to an article at the FAIR LDS site.

Now FAIR LDS, let's just put it this way, FAIR LDS has never been FAIR to me. Let's put it that way. But John Tvetnes is, well, to look at Brigham Young University's website, John A. Tvetnes, M .A. in Linguistics and M .A. in Middle East Studies, Hebrew, University of Utah, is a senior resident scholar with the Neil A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University.

He has taught at the University of Utah and the Brigham Young University Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies and has lectured in Israel and the United States. That sounds pretty impressive. And then I start looking at his article entitled Agency vs. Predestination.

Now I honestly don't recall if I had seen this before. I think I would have remembered this if I did. There's a lot of stuff at the FAIR LDS website. But I started scrolling through this and I'll just read a few sections here.

Though Luther and other reformers taught predestination, John Calvin was its foremost proponent during the time of the Protestant Reformation. Many adherents of today's Protestant evangelical movement lean heavily on Calvin, though not all evangelical Christians believe in predestination.

Calvinistic belief is expressed in the acronym TULIP, where each letter stands for one principle, total piety, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.

And then he looks at these points. And I was just scrolling down going, okay, well, having major discussions from the Book of Mormon on these issues is really a major waste of time. And remember, those of you who are new to the program haven't heard our discussions of Mormonism in the past.

I would simply mention in passing that I have made the comment numerous times that Mormonism, even though it is trying to mainstream, it is trying to find a place not so much in Protestant Christianity, but be accepted as a Christian denomination of sorts, in essence, in its attempt to proselytize.

And it still does, of course, seek to proselytize as much as possible. It is in a really difficult situation because you just can't come up with any meaningful defense of LDS belief in the plurality of gods in the Book of Mormon.

The more and more you look into Joseph Smith, the more you are tempted to have to go the direction of myth and allegory and liberalism. That's exactly what our LDS Church ended up doing, in fact. I think it's the Community of Christ is what they're called now.

And so they've never produced meaningful biblical scholarship. You can't find, I keep looking, but you cannot find a meaningful exegetical commentary on Romans, for example, written by a Mormon because they can't do it.

It's not that their people are not intelligent enough to. They can all learn languages and everything else. But you simply can't produce that kind of commentary when you're a polytheist, when you are so far removed from the worldview of the person who wrote this.

You just can't make heads or tails out of stuff. And so that was never their emphasis. I'm sure they're trying to go that direction, but this can't succeed. I mean, outside of some liberals going, well, it's an interesting insight.

But, of course, liberals will say anything is an interesting insight. I mean, it's sort of like Brian McLaren writing an endorsement for a book by John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg on Jesus. You know, I mean, once you get past a certain point, everybody can endorse everybody else because there's no more objective truth to be worried about one way or the other.

But I scrolled down this thing, and here, like I said, if you can make Ergen Kanner's sermons sound scholarly and insightful on Calvinism, you've accomplished something. Here's the beginning of the section on unconditional election by John Thovenis.

Calvin believed that God elects some people for salvation and chooses others for damnation, not based on any innate qualities of the individual, but does so out of his own divine will. Taken to the extreme, it means that one whom God chooses to save will be saved regardless of whether he is a good or evil person, while one destined for damnation will be damned even if he is righteous.

The concept is expressed in the saying, if you will or if you won't, you'll be damned if you do, you'll be damned if you don't. End quote. Continue on. This is where Latter-day Saints, and indeed most Christians, part company with Calvin, as if Calvin ever said anything even close to that.

The concept of predestination suggests that God is capricious, saving or damning people at will without regard to their righteous or sinful state. It makes Peter a liar when he declared, Of the truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness except with him.

Acts 10, 34, 35, etc. Now, you know, I imagine someone's going to point John to this program. You know, one of the things that struck me as I thought about this was, you know, Farms loves to go after bad representations of Mormonism and demonstrate when people, and there are people out there who've made bad representations of Mormonism.

And yet to turn around and to so completely miss what unconditional election is about is, I don't know, it's completely difficult to understand. I recognize there aren't a lot of Calvinists in Utah, all right?

You got Jason Wallace and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church up there and Mike Kwiatkowski and the folks there. But they do know of them. But evidently they're not too interested in knowing what they believe because if you can completely massacre a presentation like that, I don't know, just in case you're wondering, Mr. Dvetniff, it means that one whom God chooses to save regardless of whether he is a good or evil person, while one destined for damnation will be damned even if he is righteous.

I'm sorry, there is none righteous, no not one. See, there's where we sort of start off with our major differences between Mormonism is aside from the fact we have completely different gods, we have a completely different view of man as well.

That's why one of the tracts we used to pass out up in Salt Lake is called No Man is Able. And it was all on the inabilities of man, John 6, John 8, the whole testimony. There is none righteous. All deserve damnation.

All deserve God's wrath. God's wrath abides upon every man who works ungodliness. That is the state of all. And so there is, not only does this make predestination, again, makes the same error. We've talked about this how many times over the past few weeks?

Just flip side, either the predestination to life, predestination to death are equal things. They're not. Predestination is used positively of predestination unto life, election unto salvation. Those terms are not used in the same way of God's allowing a person to experience his just wrath.

There is no requirement of the extension of positive grace and mercy to cause a person to be reprobated unto judgment. They are not equal things, and yet that's how people present it. And as soon as you hear somebody present like that, you just know you're talking to somebody who's going on secondary information.

They've never really studied the issue themselves. They're not trying to be fair. And that just dismissed about 98 of everybody who addresses this subject right at that particular point in time. So anyway, as I scroll down farther, there was almost no attempt at all.

Well, okay, let me back that up. I have to either choose that John Devetniss knows nothing about Reformed theology, has done almost zero reading, and therefore the fact that he doesn't present the classic passages or provide a response to them is based on ignorance, or he does know and he's dishonest.

One of the two. I'm going to go with the first one. I'm going to assume that he just doesn't know. But when you scroll down through this stuff, not only are the primary passages that are used by Reformed people to present these concepts completely ignored.

I mean, the two texts presented for irresistible grace are John 6, 28 -29,. Then said they unto him, What shall we do? He might work the works of God. Jesus answered and said, And this is the work of God, that ye believe in him whom he hath sent.

And Philippians 2, 13,. For it is God that worketh in you both the will and dues of his good pleasure. Neither one of them would make the top ten of texts on irresistible grace in any way, shape, or form.

Calvin held that when God calls his luck to salvation, they are unable to resist his free gift. The external call goes to all mankind, but the internal call of the Holy Spirit is intended only for those chosen to be saved and cannot be resisted.

Well, of course, dead people have a hard time resisting anything personally, but that's not really addressed. But the main texts are not even addressed, and so the response texts that are offered frequently from the Book of Mormon have almost nothing to do with the issues that are presented.

And so it was just amazing to read this, and again, like I said, what caught my attention was the fact that there is actually someone who can make some of the really bad stuff we've been looking at look good, as far as that goes.

Latter-day Saint Outreach, Marian Apparitions, and Idolatry

So that was also at the same time, by the way, just along the Mormon route there, there was an article in the Utah Desert News, and it was about a new book, and I've ordered it in so I can take a look at it.

I'll just read you a little section here. Latter-day Saints and evangelical Christians tried to trade in traditional Bible bashing for understanding Friday night, discussing how to bridge the gap between the two religious beliefs.

The discussion came on the heels of a newly published book by theologian David L. Rowe titled, I Love Mormons, A New Way to Share Christ with Latter-day Saints. Rowe, the Dean of Spiritual Life at the Salt Lake Theological Seminary, said his book is an effort to tell members of different Christian faiths how to replace confrontational evangelism for active listening and respect for LDS culture.

Quote, the intended spirit of my book is that a beggar showing another beggar where the bread is, and that bread is heaven, Rowe said to the gathering of both LDS residents and members of other Christian denominations at the Grace Baptist Church in Bountiful.

Elder Alexander B. Morrison, this is funny, listen to this, I love this, it's going to happen in Utah. Elder Alexander B. Morrison, an emeritus member of the Quorum of the Seventy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said he appreciated Rowe's effort to move from ritual bashing to a more loving approach.

Morrison added, however, that Rowe's book was, quote, replete with error of fact and interpretation, end quote, that only hindered good communication between the Christian faiths. Morrison said he noted at least 36 errors about Mormonism in Rowe's book, adding that one of the most egregious was a passage insinuating LDS members believe the martyrdom of Joseph Smith is equal in importance to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Quote, this is frankly ridiculous. Latter-day Saints love and revere the prophet Joseph Smith, but we most emphatically do not worship him, end quote, Morrison said. I'm sorry, but I found that in the midst of trying to be more loving, when I appreciate his effort, but the man is clueless, is basically what he was saying.

I just found that to be sort of interesting, and Nina sent me a link yesterday. Woman sees vision of Mary in tree trunk. You know, we could, I bet you anything, if we tried, we could get a Mary vision a week.

A Mary sighting a week. What is today's Mary sighting? Juanita Gonzalez came to Fort Collins last week with a heavy heart. She planned to return to her home in North Platte, Nebraska today with renewed faith after seeing an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the trunk of a small tree in her niece's yard.

The image resembling Our Lady of Guadalupe had brought hope and joy to Gonzalez and the residents of Coach Light Plaza Apartments at 1550 Blue Spruce Drive. Residents and their friends flocked to the spot in front of Unit 45 throughout the day Saturday to place flowers and candles at the foot of the tree and marvel at the small likeness of the Virgin that suddenly appeared Friday morning.

Suddenly appeared Friday morning? It hadn't been there before, huh? Gonzalez, 48, saddened by the death of her husband six months ago and visiting her children at the apartment, said she had stepped outside to have a cigarette early Friday and discovered the image when she looked at the tree.

I knew it was her the minute I looked, Gonzalez said Saturday afternoon. Our culture has a lot of faith in miracles, and it felt really good to see her. I believed. Gonzalez called her niece, Camelia Gomez, who lives in Unit 45, to show her the tree.

We gathered everyone around and started taking pictures, Gonzalez said. I cried because it is a miracle. People came and brought candles and flowers and to pray. Well, what happens when the tree bark keeps growing and it turns into Jimmy Carter?

What are we going to do then? I'm sorry, but you should be nicer about things like this. I'm sorry, but that's idolatry, folks. Being nice about idolatry is not honoring to God. Not telling these folks, excuse me, but looking for Marian tree bark.

What was it down in South Phoenix? Some stucco, they had some water. Was it dripping out of a, I think there's water stains on stucco or something. They've got people at 11 o 'clock at night sitting around with candles praying to Mary outside of a stucco wall.

Then we had, remember we had the yucca plant on 16th Street? This was a number of years ago. This was back in the 90s. There was a yucca down on 16th Street. We shot a shootout and it curved in such a way that people thought they saw the Virgin Mary.

So about three days, traffic was snarled and everything on 16th Street. Then like three o 'clock in the morning, somebody came by with a machete and de-Marianized the yucca. It wasn't me either, by the way.

Then last year, what was it? The water stain on the underpass up in Chicago. Of course, we all remember the eBay Mary apparition. Was that Jesus? Was that Jesus on the cheese sandwich or was that Mary?

I forget which one it was. I don't know. It's all idolatry, folks. It's all absolutely worthless. It is unbelievable. Just horrible, terrible stuff going on there. But anyway, I do have some quotes to play for you because I looked at, remember last week, one of the last calls we had was they made a reference to a conversion letter.

This is from Bentonville, Arkansas, Bethel Baptist Church. This is from one of the pastors there, Brandon Cox. It's called Free to Decide, Confessions of a Former Calvinist. This is linked off the Baptist Fire website for those of you who didn't look at the blog.

I mentioned the Strange Baptist Fire website that has just come up. It will be providing responses to Baptist Fire. I even wrote my own little article that if I had been asked, they could have put on Strange Baptist Fire, but nobody ever asked me to do things like that anyways.

But then again, actually, they do ask me all the time, and I say, nope, don't have time. So it doesn't really matter. But strangebaptistfire .com, I think, is the response website. Well, this is the article that was linked off of that.

And as I was looking at what Brandon Cox had to say, one of the things he said toward the end, it says, the final straw came for me in the summer of 2005 when I purchased and listened to the well-known sermon by Dr. Adrian Rogers entitled, Predestined for Hell, Absolutely Not.

One of my strongest arguments for Calvinism was my Isogesis, E-I-S-O-G-E-S-I-S, that's spelled, of course, of Romans, Chapter 9. I listened dumbfounded as Dr. Rogers decimated every supporting argument I had given in asserting that God had created people who were foreordained to damnation simply to show forth his justice.

Dr. Rogers' masterful exegesis of this oft-studied passage convinced me to do a thorough reevaluation of my own theology. Very few Calvinists today would claim to be hyper-Calvinists. In fact, any Calvinist I've ever met would always label those a little more extreme than themselves as the hypers.

Suddenly, I was faced with evidence which proved my own leaning toward a hyper-Calvinist theology. And so, I had responded. In fact, I had to change my blog this morning. I responded twice to Adrian Rogers, once in August and September of 2002, and then what I had up there, I think, was March of 2004.

So, there were two different sermons, sermons series, that I responded to in regards to Adrian Rogers. And the Romans 9 sermons were the earlier ones. So, I changed the links this morning so you can actually find the right ones.

And I've got a few quotes to play from that, depending on what kind of time we have, so on and so forth, during the course of the program today. But we do have a few callers online, and so we're going to start with Adam.

Trinity, Matthew 28:19, and the Singular Name

Hi, Adam. Hi, Dr. White. How are you, sir?

I'm doing okay. If you're interested in these quote-unquote Calvinist conversion stories, you might want to look at Catholic Answers in January. They had a guy who was Calvinist and was actually exposed to, like, R .C. Sproul and things like that, and ended up converting to Catholicism.

I've seen a number of those.

It's painful to listen to. Yeah, well, in fact, I was listening to one of those particular conversion stories, and I was actually going to try to use it on the program to try to, you know, make something meaningful out of it.

There was so little substance to the conversion tape, the Catholic Answers webcast they did, radio program, that I really couldn't come up with anything. I mean, there was so little substance, so little scripture, so little meaningful, just, oh, you know, I discovered the beauties of Mother Church and blah, blah, blah.

I couldn't come up with anything. I had to, you know, I wasted 20 minutes listening to this thing and skipping around in it, and there wasn't anything there, so I moved on from there. But anyway.

Anyway, my question is on the Trinity. I heard your debate with Greg Stafford, and I just want to know, man, you were patient in that debate. I mean, that guy was just being so dense. Nothing was getting through his head.

It was just like, I can't tell you how many times I was listening, and I just hear what he said. I just put my head down and go, oh, good grief.

Well, I'm not sure that it's dense as it is. Greg has an established position, and I think one of the issues that Greg's facing, aside from the fact that he always has to be concerned about what the leadership of the society is going to think of what he's saying, is he has followers.

I don't think he'd use that term. He certainly wouldn't use the term disciples or anything like that, but he has people who look up to him as holding a position of leadership, in essence. So he has a position to defend.

You've got to give Greg Stafford his kudos. That was only his second debate that he had ever done. So it was like my 50th or something like that. So on that level, give him his credit. But every time everybody asks me, what surprised you most about the Stafford debate, I had read his books, of course.

It was primarily his book, In Defense of the Watchtower, An Answer to Scholars and Critics. And I had read it as I was writing my own book on the Trinity. And there were a couple sections. I have openly mentioned this many times.

There are a couple sections in my book that are much better today because I read Stafford's book. For example, primarily the sections on the identification of Jesus as Jehovah. And I had read his responses to, for example, Hebrews 1 -10 -12 and John 12 -39 -41.

So I knew exactly how he'd respond. And I took the time to interact with what he was saying, and it greatly enhanced. I mean, I think it really made my arguments significantly better and tighter.

Oh, yeah. He's not your normal Jehovah's Witness.

No, he's not your normal Jehovah's Witness. But what surprised me was even though he had my book, he had had, oh my goodness, at least four, maybe five years my book had been out, I saw no evidence whatsoever that he had actually interacted with my responses to his own position.

And, again, that is what surprised me. I expected much more on that level. Instead, basically, he gave his regular presentation, and then all he could do in cross-examination was he wanted to argue mass and count nouns and lose the audience, as if the audience would have any idea what in the world we were talking about there.

And I did everything I could to keep us...

Well, you did a brilliant job there. I mean, instead of jumping into that, and I mean, I am a biblical language reader, so I think that was just interesting. But you did a brilliant job there, because one of the weaknesses that I saw in his position is he doesn't understand that linguistic philosophy has changed, and his view of language as this just straightforward grammatical structure always has this meaning.

They always have this meaning. It was just blown away by Wittgenstein last century. You can't have language in this, you know, basic... All these words have the same meaning. All these same grammatical structures are always going to have the same meaning.

Well, what he was really trying to argue there was to go back to a very, very lengthy exchange that he had had first with Rob Bowman and then Dr. Hartley on that particular subject. And the problem was, while that is worthwhile going into in a cross-examination period, you could not even begin to define the terms of the discussion, let alone summarize the discussion in that period of time.

I mean, you couldn't do it. And that's not what cross-examination is supposed to be in the first place. You're not supposed to be necessarily introducing entire new subjects during the course of cross-examination.

You're supposed to be asking about presentations that have already been made. So people who sit back and listen to that, and they actually look at the text of Scripture as we're going through them, they'll look at Revelation 5, for example, and they'll go, what do you mean there's no worship here?

What are you talking about? Oh, I just fell on the floor when I heard that. Yeah, that's where most people have gone, uh-oh, got a little problem there, Greg. But anyways, yes, sir, you had a question about that, or was that just...

Well, I actually wanted to ask you, we were translating through Matthew in class, and we were doing the Great Commission. And I noticed that in 2819 there is one name. The name is singular, but there's three things listed there.

And I asked my teacher, and he said, well, there might be some relation there. And I said, that sounds Trinitarian. But he cautioned me, he said, we don't want to be reading our theology into the text here at this point, so we need to be careful not to do that.

Yeah, well, there's a fine line between reading your theology in and reading theology out. And I quote B .B. Warfield's comments on the singular use of anima at Matthew 2819, followed by the string of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And certainly B .B. Warfield did not have any problem in seeing the fact that you have to be able to explain the singular name at Matthew 2819 being defined as Father, Son, Holy Spirit. And he also makes a fairly strong argument that you can connect this idea of baptism and the name of God with Old Testament passages where the name of Jehovah was spoken over the people in a covenantal sense.

And so if I didn't quote that, I'm trying to remember now, this has been a number of years ago. If I didn't quote the whole section, I certainly gave you the references in Warfield's work on the Trinity, which I think you'd find extremely useful if you haven't tracked it down already.

Is it called The Lord of Glory? The Lord of Glory is on the deity of Christ. That's an excellent work. We make that available through the ministry. But there is a section of Trinitarian essays in his collected works, a ten-volume set, that I think you'd find really, really useful.

I wonder if it's on the CD-ROM. I don't have the CD-ROM myself, so I wouldn't know. I would assume it would be. All right. Thanks, James. Thanks for calling. God bless. Bye-bye. All right. Let's talk with Earl.

Mormonism, Church of Christ Baptism, and the Problem of Anonymity

Hi, Earl. How are you doing?

Hey, how are you doing? Doing all right. What I'm calling about is I've listened to most of your talks with Van Hale. Yes. What is up with that guy? I don't know if you've ever heard his debate with Dr. Walter Martin, have you?

I did many years ago. It was a train wreck. And the same thing with yours. He constantly says things. It's like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.

Actually, the actual terminology that I used back in the early 1980s, the first time that I encountered him, and by the way, you'll find this to be amazing. The first time I ever, quote, unquote, debated, and I don't use the term debate.

I normally like to use the term debate in a very formal sense. But the first time he and I argued on a radio program, let's put it that way, was on a radio program here in Phoenix with a fellow who is now nationally known as a shock jock by the name of Tom Likas.

We were on the Tom Likas show together, and we did the Likas show one day, and the next day we were on KFLR in Phoenix. And we had quite the interesting encounters there. And I don't know how many times I've been on his radio program.

I think at least around a dozen times now up there in Utah. And one of the last things that Van ever said to me, Rich was there with me. This was a number of years ago. We had just finished a lengthy program with him, and he actually gave us a compliment.

At least I considered it to be a compliment. We were standing in the rather darkened offices because it was already late at night after the program was over, his live call-in program. And he made the comment to me, he said, you know, after all these years, you're still saying the same things that you were saying when we first debated, when we first met each other.

And what he meant by that is we had stayed focused on the central issues. What does Mormonism teach concerning who God is, who Christ is, what salvation is, et cetera, et cetera. And I took that as a wonderful compliment.

I don't know if he meant it that way. But I took that as a wonderful compliment that we hadn't. And I think he did mean it as a compliment because now that I think about it, the context was all these passing fads in LDS apologetics, you know, the white salamander letter when it came out and all these things that people have jumped on.

You can see, for example, in Godmakers 2 and stuff like that. And we didn't jump on those things. We've stayed focused upon what's really central about Mormonism, and that's just the way we've been from the beginning.

So I think he did recognize that on that level we aren't the sensationalists that you see amongst other folks. But I'll never forget, and I don't know if you've heard of it. Did you hear the program he and I did on Calvinism?

I think I have. I've listened to, like I said, most of what you have on your website. Okay. And a few little snippets around other websites.

The reason I ask is I'll never forget. This was in an odd little studio. I don't remember even why they were there. I've only been in the studio once. It was in a building right off of the freeway, and it was actually up near the Airport Motel 6.

It was behind the Denny's, Weedy Debt, up there. I'm telling Rich this. And near Redwood, right off Redwood Road up there. And it was just he and I. I don't think there was anybody else there. I don't even remember there was a board op.

I think Van even had to do the board oping that day. But he and I did a program on it, and I'll never forget him saying. It was one of the calmest programs we had done. There was very little rancor or anything like that.

And I remember him saying at one point as we were going through Romans 9. He said, well, he said, now obviously, if I started with your presuppositions, like the inerrancy of the text of Scripture, then your position would make perfect sense.

I just don't start there. And it was such a, to me, such a confession of exactly what this whole thing is all about. If you start with the assumption that the Bible actually presents God's truth, then, yeah, your position makes perfect sense.

He's a very funny character. If you notice that he tries to almost paint Mormonism, in a sense, to be sort of just another denomination really, just another really. Because when you listen to him, he constantly quotes church fathers out of context.

And at the same time, you want to ask him, were any of those church fathers remotely Mormon? Right. And I don't know. I just, it was real interesting. Another, have you ever heard of Dr., no, I'm sorry, Steve Gregg?

Steve Gregg? Yes. He's debated Gene Cook and he's a, I think. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Is he up in like the Nebraska area? Oregon. Oregon. Yeah, I've heard the name. People have referred me a number of times to some online, you know, MP3 files or something. Yeah, the name's familiar. But we get a lot of folks who say, hey, you know, you should debate this guy.

You should debate that guy. You know, I mean, we just got a call right before the program about a guy with Calvary Chapel that needs to debate James White, you know. And I'm just like, okay, you know, whatever.

But you need to realize, you know, people, all the time I get emails from folks saying, hey, you know, our church would love to have you in. We're wondering if you're available next month. And it's like, excuse me, folks, I'm booking in the summer of 2007 right now.

You know, I mean, nope, not available next month. So, yeah, there's lots and lots of folks and my normal response is, okay, could you send me some of their books and some of their teaching, some of their experience teaching, their lectures, things like that.

That normally ends it right there. In my opinion, his debate with Gene Cook, he really did a better job to me. I don't know, Gene didn't have a way of putting, they debated on Calvinism, and Gene just didn't have a way of putting it in words.

Not that necessarily Steve's position was correct or true, but he presented a better argument.

Well, you know, I'll have to, you know, like I said, there may be better folks out there. We certainly hope there are because they've got to be better than some of the folks we've been reviewing lately.

But, you know, I'll listen to, you know, someone can link me to that particular debate. You know, that's the kind of thing that if I can get hold of the MP3, I can stick it in my MP3 player when I'm out riding, like I've got a 57-mile ride tomorrow, I can listen to pretty much the entirety of a debate over the course of that time.

I think I can do that through your website, right, Cindy? Yeah, sure. Okay, now I bought it from Gene, so I'll probably have to, like, email him or call him or something to make sure I can give it to him.

Something tells me Gene would not have too much of a difficulty if you hooked me up to his MP3 to listen to it. I will hook you up.

Last thing before I go, and this is regarding the cult, excuse me, I'm sorry, Church of Christ, I'm sorry.

Which one, international churches or the old style? The old style.

Okay. I've been debating a lot of those guys, and I can't help but think that they're so far off. In other words, Acts 238.

You know, I had a guy come up to me at the Sedalia debate. The first guy who came up to me after the debate, I walked down off the stage, haven't even put all my stuff up. I haven't even packed my stuff up yet.

The first guy up to me is a Church of Christ guy, and he wants to challenge me to debate on baptism. And he said, would you be interested in debating baptism? And I said, let me take a wild guess. He said he represented some church crisis.

Let me take a wild guess. He'd like to do like three nights, and we're going to spend three nights debating Acts 238. And he just sort of looked at me like, oh, you've heard of this before. I said, you know, I said, you know what, don't have the slightest interest.

I said, that has been, we had a Reformed Baptist pastor in Tennessee, Nashville, over the past couple of years, did a number of debates, the Church of Christ pastor down there. If somebody wants to hear what a Reformed Baptist has to say about baptism, I'll refer you to those MP3s.