April 27, 2004

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.

The American Association of Christian Counselors and T. D. Jakes

And good morning, welcome to The Dividing Line, 11 a .m. in the Mountain West, at least amongst those of us who know what time is. And it's other times elsewhere out there where you don't. But anyway, hey, you know, someone sent me an email this morning.

And I looked up the information, needed to make sure that it was accurate. And lo and behold, I'm looking at the advertisement for the American Association of Christian Counselors. And they are going to have, there's a guy surrendering, must be a Frenchman on the front picture here.

If you look up the AACC .net, they're Breaking Free Counsel Fest 2004. That must be a really exciting thing to go to, a bunch of counselors. Can you just imagine? Anything you say will be analyzed. Could I have a few more potatoes with that?

You know, that might mean something. That just doesn't sound like something I want to go to. Anyway, but the reason I was looking at this, because I don't go to these types of things anyways, was someone was mentioning the people who are going to be there.

And I guess this is at Shadow Mountain Community Church, which is David Jeremiah's church. And Bruce Wilkinson is going to be there. Thank you, thank you. I guess the money from the Prayer of Jabez is drying up, so he's got to go back to work.

And Stormy Omardian is going to be there. And a bunch of people, Greg Smalley, I guess I've heard that name, he needs a new picture. That is, they did something, anybody who knows the web knows exactly what they did there.

They took a teeny, tiny picture and tried to blow it up, and it's all pixelated and looks terrible. Anyway, some of these folks I don't know, H .B. London, Diane Langberg, Christian Counseling, whatever.

But what stood out, aside from the interesting expression on the face, is Bishop T .D. Jakes. Yes, I mean, that would fit with the breaking free thing, that's his stuff. But here you've got Jakes speaking at David Jeremiah's church in September of this year.

John Tesh is going to be doing music. And the problem, of course, being that the issues concerning Jakes' view of the Trinity have not really been dealt with. And so, another situation where, hey, Trinity, no Trinity, no problem.

All is well, as long as you move a lot of books, I guess. And that's exactly what T .D. Jakes does. That's a sad little commentary on what's going on in our world today. Then again, on the other side of things, if you saw the blog this morning, late, late last night.

Actually, it would be early this morning now that I think about it. That's how late last night it was. Early this morning, I put something up regarding some of the comments that I heard on some of the talk shows yesterday and saw some of the coverage on television, which, you know, unless you have some odd television or odd television station, anything you see covered is going to be covered with such a horrific slant anymore that you can't even begin to tell what's factual and what isn't.

But the big, huge rally in Washington for abortion rights, what a, you know, people have asked the question, did anything change after 9 -1 -1? All these people running around going, oh, you know, God bless America and all the prayer meetings and all the rest of that stuff.

And I was a wet blanket because I kept saying, well, you know what? When we see a change in the moral fiber of the nation, then I'll, you know, I'll be willing to get on the bandwagon and go, yee-haw, all right.

We haven't seen any change in the moral fiber of the nation, to be perfectly honest with you. And the fact that over half a million people could show up in Washington, ostensibly, of course, if you read the signs for women's rights, of course, approximately 50 of the pre-born children who die in abortion happen to be female.

I've always found that to be just a disgusting irony. But anyway, the fact that that many people can show up and chant the same mindless rhetoric that couldn't survive 30 seconds of meaningful interaction on an intellectual level is a sad, sad statement concerning the state of the nation.

And it's difficult for me to watch those things. It truly, truly, truly is. It's very difficult to listen to these folks chanting the same mind-numbed stuff that just, you know, if you actually could force this person to think rationally, they'd just implode, but you can't do that.

I was listening to someone cross-examining a pro-abort on the radio yesterday, and, man, I think they got through two questions in about 12 seconds before they immediately imploded. They could no longer provide a rational response to the question that was asked.

And that was it, off into the emotionalism, off into the let's-get-everybody-going-rah-rah-rah, and let's-call-you-names, and ad hominem, and, oh, it's just, ugh. Well, all sorts of things going on these days.

877 -753 -3341. If you've got some comments concerning current events, questions concerning various and sundry things, that's the phone number to call. I forgot to open up a neat little window here for the person who's supposed to be talking.

That's why I missed the calls last time. We had two callers. I didn't even know it. Now I have a window open. Now I'll know these things. Anyway, we use high-tech technology here. Yes, I see that test.

Thank you. I see that hand. Thank you. Bless you. Bless you. Please come down forward at the end of the service. We use high-tech technology. The chat channel, we have said many times, probably exists on a bunch of old 386 servers.

That the CMOS is stuck January 1st, 1980 someplace. That's pretty much, I think, how it works, personally. But that's okay. I did have something I'd like to discuss this morning as the calls come flooding in.

That's really not what's going on, but that's okay. It's really relevant to anybody today who works in Christian ministry and is concerned about Christian theology. I kind of like the Dell commercial with duct tape.

I don't know about the Dell commercial with duct tape. Please don't tell me about Dell and duct tape, because I have a Dell monitor sitting in front of me. I like my Dell monitor sitting in front of me.

My 19-inch flat screen, I think it's wonderful.

386s.

Yeah, uh-huh. This is my Rush Limbaugh impersonation where he's talking to the guy. Until Rush Limbaugh started doing that, that was considered just absolutely, that's wrong. You never, ever talk to your engineer.

You don't rattle papers. You don't have dead air. Like when he's talking with somebody and all of a sudden it just gets quiet. That is just, that was supposed to be completely wrong. But see what happens when someone who makes millions and millions of dollars is doing it?

Does it? All the rules change.

Just boop.

That's how they keep the 386s running.

With duct tape? Duct tape. I never saw this commercial.

I'm sorry.

Oh, see.

You just don't get out.

Why would I see these commercials if I got out?

Oh, that's a good point.

Wouldn't I need to like have satellite like someone else?

Hmm? Hmm?

I don't have satellite. I don't even have cable.

Okay?

All right?

So, quit mocking me.

All right?

Go dig a trench.

Anyway, I'd tell you about the commercial, but we don't have time.

No.

I hear the phones ringing off the hook over there. So, I'm sure...

You're really lighting them up.

I thought that was your job. Is that my job? I'm just here to answer the questions, man. That's just all there is to it. Hey, let's get serious for just a moment here. Having invested the first nine minutes in various and sundry other things.

Augustine, the Fall of Rome, and Historical Humility

He lived at the ends of the heyday of the Roman Empire. Depending on when you really identify the fall of the Roman Empire, many people would identify the sacking of Rome by Alaric in 410 as really a good date, even though it still stumbled along for a number of decades after that.

But Aurelius Augustine, St. Augustine, and if you live in Florida, his name is St. Augustine. Augustine was born in 354, died in 430. So, he's right in that time period of tremendous upheavals and changes in the Roman Empire.

It's difficult for us, especially if you're not really historically minded and just sort of look back upon dates as just numbers on a piece of paper. It's difficult for us to imagine just how tremendously earth-shattering the events of his day were for people in his culture.

I mean, I was talking about this. In fact, that's why I decided to share it with you. I was talking about this with my class last night late in the evening, very late in the evening, development of patristic theology class.

And we were discussing the context of Augustine and the fact that when Rome fell, when a foreign army, in essence, waltzed in, they didn't really do much. They sort of came in, played around a little bit and left.

But it had a huge, massive impact upon the psyche of everyone. Because if you try to put yourself in their situation, Rome had been the stabilizing factor of culture for a thousand years. And so, as far as anyone can remember, Rome had defined culture for the collective memory of everyone in the West at that particular point in time.

And so for this to happen, there had to be a reason. And of course, many of the pagans blamed the Christian faith. The Christian faith had become a religio litita, a legal religion, barely a century before, and had become predominant in the leadership of the empire, even a shorter period of time than that.

And so many people were saying that Christianity is to blame and all these things taking place. And in the midst of all this, you have Augustine. And what I wanted to discuss briefly on the program today was the fact that here you have a man.

And if you've ever looked at his writings, I don't know anybody who's ever read everything, especially since not everything is even available in English today. But if you look at the early Church Fathers set, you'll find numerous volumes of Augustine's writings.

And you can hardly read anyone who's writing on Church history who doesn't quote Augustine at some point in time or another on all sorts of issues. I mean, he wrote on a wide variety of subjects. That's one of the problems in being in his position, was he was in essence forced to address such a wide range, wide variety of topics that later in his life, he could sort of look back and go, You know what I said about such and so?

I'm not really certain that that was the best answer I could have given there. Let's try going this direction. And he had to look back and go, Wow, you know, I've learned about this and I've learned about that and I've changed my viewpoints on this.

And it takes a big man to be able to do things like that. And we can appreciate that. But the fact of the matter is, probably, most people would agree that outside of the Apostle Paul, Augustine has influenced Western theology more than anyone else.

And if you look at Luther, if you look at Calvin, who was the greatest impact upon them? Who was the greatest source for them? Who had the greatest impact upon their theology? But Augustine. So even if you were to try to argue, Well, who's had more impact, Calvin or Augustine or something like that?

Well, obviously Calvin was deeply influenced by Augustine. So you have somebody here who truly is vital to understand, even if you're not a Christian, if you want to understand Western culture, you need to understand something about Augustine and about his beliefs.

Now for Christians, one of the reasons I raise the issue of Augustine, and this is, you know, some people, some of you have been reading the debate book with Dave Hunt and you're like, Well, you know, that one chapter, that one section where he goes after Augustine and Calvin and all that stuff, you know, you didn't really say much in response.

I couldn't. I only had 2 ,000 words, and there's only so much you can say historically in 2 ,000 words. And you can't really try to give someone a meaningful basis in history in that amount of space, especially when they don't want a meaningful basis in history.

They're not interested in it. And that, of course, is the case with Dave Hunt and Augustine and Calvin. He has his own purpose for raising those issues and as to what those men actually believe and why they actually believe it.

I really don't think he cares one way or the other. But be that as it may, when you look at Augustine and you recognize the tremendous amount of insight that he had into theological things, we in the modern setting can learn a lot from him because despite all of his brilliance and despite all of his insights, the final form of his theology was internally self-contradictory.

And he was quoted constantly by the early church fathers. He was quoted constantly by the reformers and by the Roman Catholics at the time of the Reformation. And so how could they do that? Was one side just grossly misusing him?

No. Both sides could quote Augustine in support of their own unique positions and they could do so in context. They didn't have to misrepresent him at all. Well, how could they do that? Well, because the Roman Catholics were quoting Augustine from his works against the Donatists and the reformers were quoting Augustine from his works against the Pelagians.

So in other words, when we look at Augustine, if we're fair in analyzing what he believed, then we will see all sorts of things we would have to disagree with. But if we go beyond the Dave Hunt style, Ah, he's a proto-Catholic!

He's the first Roman Catholic! If we go beyond that hysterical type of history and ask questions as to why, we discover that Augustine was, as we all are, the product of the battles that he fought in his life.

The two major theological battles that he fought was there in North Africa as the Bishop of Hippo. He didn't even want to be the Bishop of Hippo, but he was elected by the people and he accepted their call.

One of the biggest battles he had to face initially was a schism in the church. It was a schism between the Catholics, as they called themselves, and the Donatists. And the Donatists were a group that originally broke away from the fellowship of the rest of the churches in North Africa over the issue of sacraments.

And specifically, they broke away over the issue as to whether a sacrament that was performed by an individual who was not in the state of grace would be valid. Those of you who've studied church history know this is the debate between ex-opera operante and ex-opera operato sacramentalism.

Either one believes the sacraments are dependent for their efficacy upon the state of grace of the individual performing them, or the efficacy of the sacrament is based upon its own nature, the working of the work itself rather than the working of the one who works the work.

That's the difference between the two Latin phrases. And the Donatists split off because of the ordination of a bishop. And they believed that one of the individuals involved in the ordination of the bishop was in fact a traudatory person who had cooperated with Roman authorities under persecution and had turned over the scriptures, and that hence he was not in a state of grace, and therefore the ordination was improper.

They couldn't follow the bishop who was ordained by such an individual, and so they broke away. Much more developed after that, in the sense of the view of a pure church, a separated church, and after the Council of Nicaea and after Constantine's involvement with the church, they stood in rejection of what we would later call Constantinianism, which eventually led to the idea of a state church.

And so Augustine fought against the Donatists, and he did so first and foremost theologically, and hence developed and defended fully the concept of ex opera operato sacramentalism, that is that a sacrament's efficacy is based upon its nature as a sacrament, not upon the nature of the person who performs it.

Hence a Buddhist can properly baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as long as those words are used, then the sacrament itself is valid, if not necessarily efficacious, but at least it's valid, and that distinction is not one that necessarily followed Augustine after his own days, but that's a whole other issue.

That whole debate, which extended over years, involved the writing of books, so on and so forth, deeply influenced Augustine's doctrine of the church. And eventually Augustine did give in to pressure, at first he resisted it, but eventually gave in to pressure to allow for the use of military force to suppress the Donatists.

And so the emperor sends troops down, and there is a suppression of the Donatists, they're driven out of their churches, and of course for the Donatists, this was just further confirmation of what they already believed, that is, they believed that the state church was nothing more than baptized paganism anyways, and it had only been a little over a century since the state church at the time, which was pagan, had been persecuting the Christians, and now it was just a baptized paganism that was continuing to persecute the true church.

And so they just figured, hey, the state church is just acting in accordance with its own nature at this point, nothing really surprising or unusual about this at all. And so that entire scenario in Augustine's life, very, very important for understanding his view of the church, his view of sacraments, and it's those writings, those assertions, that perspective, that Rome was able to very accurately and fairly cite in support of themselves and the debates with the reformers.

However, that was not the last great apologetic battle that Augustine had to fight, and in fact, his writings on that subject were not nearly as widely distributed, at least during his lifetime and shortly thereafter, as those that were relevant to the second great battle that he fought, and that was the battle against Pelagius and Pelagianism.

And it is in that battle that we have the development of Augustine's doctrine of grace. When you engage in a battle, when you engage in a conflict, your theology that is relevant to that conflict becomes much more developed than other areas of your theology might be.

If you, for example, are involved in battling against modernism in defense of the inerrancy of scripture or something like that, then your bibliology may be significantly more developed than your soteriology.

At the same time, if you're defending the doctrines of grace or something along those lines, your soteriology may be significantly more developed than your theology proper. If you've got a lot of Jehovah's Witnesses in the area, maybe your theology proper, especially in regards to the deity of Christ, your Christology, would be more developed, etc., etc.

You can understand how it is that the battles that define your particular situation will cause a related growth in understanding of a particular area, but not necessarily the whole of theology. And especially in our context today, many people can develop a certain area of their theology to a tremendous degree, and yet we don't challenge people to compare what they believe about the church with what they believe about the Bible with what they believe about theology proper with what they believe about soteriology to see if their theology is, in point of fact, consistent.

And so there are many people who will say one thing in one area, and then they'll say something else in another area, and if you've actually worked in both areas, you sort of sit there and go, um, doesn't he realize that there's a contradiction there?

And maybe he doesn't. If one area is strong and the other area is weak, he may have no idea that there's actually a contradiction there. Many of us may not. None of us have reached perfection as yet. And so even Augustine, even a man with his type of insights, as he develops his doctrine of grace over against Pelagius, he begins developing the concept of predestination, election.

He does recognize that his doctrine of grace impacts his doctrine of the church. It's not like he completely ignored it. In fact, some of the perspectives that he ends up holding, which would make a number of us go, that's odd, where did he get that?

One of the primary reasons that he gets that odd perspective is because he's working within a system where he's seeking some level of consistency, even if he didn't necessarily end up arriving at it. And so you have this tremendous battle about Pelagius, his denial of the absolute necessity of grace, the nature of grace, the nature of salvation, and you have the statements that the reformers would very frequently be focusing upon, found in Augustine at this point.

Now, there are other areas. For example, Augustine's doctrine of scripture and its efficiency, very much on the reformer's side over against Rome's side at that point. But as far as citations go, you're going to find the reformers very frequently citing Augustine in regards to his views on the doctrines of grace and things like that.

And I've mentioned before on the program that there's a citation from B .B. Warfield where he said,. And so we have the luxury in hindsight of looking back and criticizing Augustine and seeing these inconsistencies.

Now, we can respond to that in one of two ways. We can take the narrow-minded approach, which removes Augustine from his context, ignores the issues that he was dealing with, ignores the fact that, you know what, maybe we suffer from the same problems ourselves.

We can get rid of all that. We can take the narrow-minded route that puts him in our own context, and says, well, look, since he's wrong about this, this, and this, then I have to treat Augustine the same way that I would treat a modern person as the same beliefs, assuming, wrongly, that he had the same opportunities, the same amount of information available to him, the same clarity of doctrinal teaching to stand upon that we have so that we can recognize errors and eschew them.

That's what happens when you don't allow early church writers to live in a context in which they themselves lived. And you try to judge them on a different standard, which is what happens all the time, sadly, in very surface-level treatments of these issues, whether it's from a positive way.

And what I mean by that is whether you find it in a Roman Catholic website where they're being viewed as if they're just ancient versions of modern Roman Catholics with modern Roman Catholic beliefs and all the rest of that stuff, which they didn't have, or what you find in the negative way.

Again, a good example being Dave Hunt's attacks upon Calvin and Augustine showing absolutely no desire whatsoever to be fair, showing no desire whatsoever to be accurate, just simply picking and choosing the worst possible facts you can pick and choose, stringing them together and go, ooh, evil, evil, bad, runaway type of presentation.

So what do we learn from all this? And we're going to take a break here in a couple moments, and maybe you have some comments about that or other things at 877 -753 -3341. But the point being, what do we learn from this?

Well, as I've presented this information down over the past number of years, I have often emphasized, as a part of my presentation, the fact that if someone with the level of insight that Augustine demonstrated in his writings could end up with these blind spots, well, so can we.

And so we learn a little bit of historical humility in looking at someone like that, and really we learn to try to look back on history with some semblance of a desire to fairly treat those who've come before us and try to understand a little bit better the context in which they were in.

But we also see in Augustine a very fiery commitment to a recognition that you can't just simply go, well, you know what, hey, you know, if Zosimus up there in Rome wants to rehabilitate Pelagius, hey, that's cool with us, you know, hey, let's just all get along, let's just all hold hands and sing kumbaya.

He didn't do that either. He stood in the gap. He said, no way. Now, you might say, well, some of the things he stood for, like against Dantus, were wrong.

Well, that's true.

So is it possible to be right in one area and wrong in another area?

Yep, seems to be. Seems to be.

What can we learn from that? Well, I think we can apply it to all sorts of situations in our own context and the battles that we deal with today as well. And so just a little historical situation, you can probably develop the same kind of analysis of almost anybody from back in those days and learn the same thing from them and Athanasius or Jerome or anybody and apply it to our situation today.

877 -753 -3341 is the phone number. Waiting for you to become part and parcel of the program today. 877 -753 -3341. We'll be right back.

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Church History, the Renaissance, and Finding Sources

Well, welcome back to The Dividing Line.

It is 27 minutes before the hour. You know, that's sort of irrelevant since most people listen to this via an archive, and I don't know what time it is when you listen to an archive, because you can start at the archive at any time you want, and therefore the time thing is completely irrelevant.

But it doesn't really matter because it sounds like I'm going to be singing the rest of the program in an English accent. Since I... Oh, I hear... Hark! I hear Rich upon the phone on the other side of the wall.

All I had to do was mention my English accent and mention singing at the same time, and immediately those folks who love us and care for us and... I'm really looking at the possibility of getting over to London in March of next year.

And if I do that, I'm telling you something. The next number of Dividing Lines will all be done in an English accent. How could I not? If I go to London and I get to hear it and experience it, then I'll...

In fact, I may get to go to, you know, pop up to Scotland, too, and plant my foot upon my ancestral grounds and do things like that. So I don't see... I don't see any notification from anybody. It's probably a telemarketer calling or something like that.

That would not be a bad thing. Oh! Oh! Oh, okay. All right. Nothing like a controversial topic to address today, eh? 877 -753 -3341. Let's go ahead and talk to someone who either has a serious question or just simply cannot stand the possibility of the recording of my singing in an English accent.

Let's talk with... I can almost guarantee you that is not how Jonathan is spelled. I don't think I've ever seen Jonathan spelled that way, but that's okay. Jonathan in South Florida. Hello, Jonathan.

877 -753 -3341.

You got to turn the feed off there, bro, because you're not going to... Just turn him off there for a second, Rich, because he's not going to hear me for about 60 seconds. Okay. Why don't you get on the phone and let him know.

Calling 101. Turn the volume down. Especially, you know, on radio programs, there's only a seven-second delay. Isn't that fun when you hear that? When we go to Jonathan in South Florida. One, two, three, seven seconds there.

Hi! Hi! Turn the radio down. Okay, just a second. Then you hear them... It's a lot of fun. But that's even worse in IRC. Not IRC, but on this, because you can hear me. Oh, okay. We have it turned down.

We're listening to the right thing now. All righty. Hey, Jonathan.

Hey.

Hey. There you go.

There you go. I couldn't hear you for a second. There.

That's because you were listening to the computer rather than listening to me.

Yeah, it was really messing me up.

Oh, yeah. Hey, you sound like you own an accent, too.

Yes, I do. Yes.

Where are you from?

Well, I'm originally from England.

I am from England.

Oh, yes. From England.

Oh, jolly. That's good.

I thought you would like my accent.

I love it. It just automatically brings it out in me. Do you know we don't have any sidewalks here in America? Isn't that silly?

That's horrendous.

Okay, I'm sorry, Jonathan. What was your question, anyway?

Okay, my question was just in regards to research in church history. I remember listening to a teaching of yours once, and you were saying how the medieval church, so many people think, I didn't see a lot of, how do you study church history?

Because I find it effective, and you get an efficacy, if you will, on the period of church history. So how do you study church history?

Well, the vast majority of the stuff that you're going to run across is probably going to be fairly surface level. So, really, you start digging into that kind of stuff, and I think I know what you're talking about.

As far as, were you talking about the files on the Phoenix Reformed website about church history? Is that what you're talking about?

Correct.

Yeah.

I was referring specifically there to some graduate study that I did at ASU on the Renaissance and the period building up to the Renaissance, and I think what I was referring to there is that sometimes we have the idea that the Dark Ages were just, we don't understand that there were still things going on even when society had regressed a tremendous distance from what it had once been.

I was reminding my class just last night that during certain centuries around the turn of the millennium, the average person in Europe never traveled more than seven miles from where they were born in their entire lifetime.

So think about what that would be like. Figure three and a half miles either direction from where you're born, and that's your world. Make a circle out of it, and that is the entirety of your world. It's a very, very small world, not a very challenging world, not necessarily a world with a lot of mystery and wonder to it, and certainly not the kind of world that would necessarily, especially in light of the decline of the cities and the decline, massive collapse in education and so on and so forth, not the kind of world that would really inspire you to do a whole lot of stuff.

So that explains a lot of the slowing in any type of development or things like that, but that doesn't mean that everyone everywhere was that way. There were still some areas of light, and the only reason, to answer your question, I took a specialty graduate class on the subject of the Renaissance, and of course those specialty books then that go into the Renaissance would normally contain a couple chapters at the beginning where they would go much more deeply than most of your general history books would into the preceding period.

You've always got to establish some sort of a context for the period that you're specifically addressing. So a lot of it is when you start studying a particular subject, you might discover that a particular writer at a particular period of time was very influential in that, so you read that person and in reading that person, and sometimes, interestingly enough, reading the introductory sections where an editor is introducing the writings of an ancient writer or a medieval writer or something like that, sometimes you'll find some real nuggets, stuff that probably isn't big enough to find its way into its own book, but some stuff, some research maybe that particular editor has done and that particular individual, frequently they've done a doctoral dissertation or something on that particular person, and they'll have dug stuff up that you're not going to find in your normal history books.