April 27, 2004

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Casting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.
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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.
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Our host is Dr. James White, Director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an Elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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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
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United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
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James White. And good morning. Welcome to The Dividing Line. 11 a .m.
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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.
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But anyway, hey, you know, someone sent me an email this morning and I looked up the information and needed to make sure that it was accurate.
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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, it must be a
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Frenchman on the front picture here. If you look up the AACC .net,
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they're Breaking Free Counsel Fest 2004. That must be a really exciting thing to go to, a bunch of counselors.
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Just imagine anything you say will be analyzed. Could I have a few more potatoes with that?
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You know, that might mean something. It just doesn't sound like something I want to go to.
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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.
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And I guess this is at Shadow Mountain Community Church, which is David Jeremiah's church.
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And Bruce Wilkinson's going to be there. I guess the, thank you, thank you.
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I guess the money from the Prayer of Jabez is drying up, so he's got to go back to work. And Stormy Omardian's going to be there.
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And a bunch of people, Greg Smalley, I guess I've heard that name somewhere. He needs a new picture. That is, they did something, anybody who knows the web knows exactly what they did there.
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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
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I don't know, H .B. London, Diane Langberg. I don't, you know, Christian counseling, whatever.
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But what stood out, aside from the interesting expression on the face, is
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Bishop T .D. Jakes. Yes, I mean, that would fit with the Breaking Free thing.
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That's his stuff. But here you've got Jakes speaking at David Jeremiah's church in September of this year.
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John Tesh is going to be doing music. And the problem, of course, being that the issues concerning Jakes' view of the
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Trinity have not really been dealt with. And so, another situation where, hey,
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Trinity, no Trinity, no problem, all is well, as long as you move a lot of books,
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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.
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Then again, on the other side of things, if you saw the blog this morning, late, late last night.
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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.
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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?
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All these people running around going, oh, you know, God bless America and all the prayer meetings and all the rest of that stuff.
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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
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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.
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And the fact that over half a million people could show up in Washington.
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Ostensibly, of course, you know, 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.
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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.
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And it's difficult for me to watch those things. It truly, truly, truly is.
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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 just implode, but you can't do that.
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I was listening to someone cross -examining a pro -abort on the radio yesterday.
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And man, I think they got through two questions in about 12 seconds before they immediately imploded.
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They could no longer provide a rational response to the question that was asked.
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They just, 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 just, 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.
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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, is there, we had two callers,
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I didn't even know it, now I have a window open, now I'll know these things. Anyway, we use, we use high -tech technology here.
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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.
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We use high -tech technology, the chat channel we have said many times probably exists on a bunch of old 386 servers, that the
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CMOS is stuck January 1st, 1980 someplace. That's pretty much, I think, how it works, personally, but that's okay.
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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.
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And it is relevant to, well, it's really relevant to anybody today and who works in Christian ministry and is concerned about Christian theology.
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I kind of like the Dell commercial with duct tape. I don't know about the Dell commercial with duct tape.
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Please don't tell me about Dell and duct tape, because I have a Dell monitor sitting in front of me, and I like my Dell monitor sitting in front of me, my 19 -inch flat screen,
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I think it's wonderful, 386s, yeah, uh -huh. This is sort of, this is my
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Rush Limbaugh impersonation where he's talking to the guy, and until Rush Limbaugh started doing that, that was considered just absolutely, that's wrong.
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You never, ever talk to your engineer. You don't rattle papers. You don't have dead air.
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Like when he's talking with somebody and all of a sudden just gets quiet, that is just, that was supposed to be completely wrong.
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But see what happens when someone who makes millions and millions of dollars doing it does it? All the rules change.
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Just boop, that's the way it, the way it works. No, that's how they keep the 386s running. With duct tape? Duct tape. I never saw this commercial.
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I'm sorry. Oh, see, you just don't get out. Why would I see these commercials if I got out?
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Oh, that's a good point. Wouldn't I need to like have satellite like someone else? Hmm? Hmm?
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I don't have, I don't even have cable. Okay? All right? So, quit mocking me, all right?
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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.
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So, I don't know. Oh, yeah, you're really lighting them up, yeah. Thought that was your job.
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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.
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Having invested the first nine minutes in various and sundry other things. He lived at the ends of the heyday of the
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Roman Empire. Depending on when you really identify the fall of the
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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.
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But Aurelius Augustine, St. Augustine, and if you live in Florida, his name is
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St. Augustine. Augustine was born in 354, died in 430.
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So, he's right in that time period of tremendous upheavals and changes in the
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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.
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It's difficult for us to imagine just how tremendously earth -shattering the events of his day were for people in his culture.
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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.
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And the fact that when Rome fell, when a foreign army, in essence, waltzed in, they really didn't do much.
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They sort of came in, played around a little bit and left. But it had a huge, massive impact upon the psyche of everyone.
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Because if you try to put yourself in their situation, Rome had been the stabilizing factor of culture for a thousand years.
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And so, as far as anyone can remember, Rome had defined culture for the collective memory of everyone in the
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West at that particular point in time. And so for this to happen, there had to be a reason.
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And of course, many of the pagans blamed the Christian faith. The Christian faith had become a religio licita, 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.
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And so many people were saying that Christianity is to blame and all these things taking place.
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In the midst of all this, you have Augustine. What I want to discuss briefly on the program today was the fact that here you have a man.
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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.
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But if you look at the early Church Fathers set, you'll find numerous volumes of Augustine's writings.
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And you can hardly read anyone who's writing on church history who doesn't quote
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Augustine at some point in time or another on all sorts of issues. I mean, he wrote on a wide variety of subjects.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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Apostle Paul, Augustine has influenced Western theology more than anyone else.
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And if you look at Luther, if you look at Calvin, who was the greatest impact upon them?
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Who was the greatest source for them? Who had the greatest impact upon their theology?
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But Augustine. So even if you were to try to argue, well, you know, who's had more impact, Calvin or Augustine or something like that?
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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
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Christian, if you want to understand Western culture, you need to understand something about Augustine and about his beliefs.
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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 and one section where he goes after Augustine and Calvin and all that stuff.
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And, 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.
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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.
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They're not interested in it. And that, of course, is the case with Dave Hunt and Augustine and Calvin.
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He has his own purpose for raising those issues and as to what those men actually believe and why they actually believe that.
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I really don't think he cares one way or the other. But be it 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.
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And he was quoted constantly by the early church fathers, not by the early church fathers, yeah, duh, he was quoted constantly by the reformers and by the
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Roman Catholics at the time of the Reformation. And so how could they do that?
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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.
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They didn't have to misrepresent him at all. Well, how could they do that? Well, because the
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Roman Catholics were quoting Augustine from his works against the Donatists and the reformers were quoting
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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 that we would have to disagree with, but if we go beyond the
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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.
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The two major theological battles that he fought was there in North Africa as the
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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.
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One of the biggest battles he had to face initially was a schism in the church. It was a schism between the
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Catholics, as they called themselves, and the Donatists. And the
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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.
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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.
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Those of you who've studied church history know this is the debate between ex -opera operante and ex -opera operato sacramentalism.
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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.
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That's the difference between the two Latin phrases. And the Donatists split off because of the ordination of a bishop.
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And they believed that one of the individuals involved in the ordination of the bishop was in fact a trodditor, a 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.
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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
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Council of Nicaea and after Constantine's involvement with the church, they stood in rejection of what we would later call
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Constantinianism, which eventually led to the idea of a state church. And so Augustine fought against the
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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.
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And 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
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Augustine after his own days, but that's a whole other issue. That whole debate, which extended over years and involved the writing of books, so on and so forth, deeply influenced
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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
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Donatists. And so the emperor sends troops down, and there is a suppression of the
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Donatists, they're driven out of their churches, and of course for the Donatists, this was just further confirmation of what they already believed.
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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
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Christians, and now it was just a baptized paganism that was continuing to persecute the true church.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And it is in that battle that we have the development of Augustine's doctrine of grace.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Many of us may not. None of us have reached perfection as yet. And so even
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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.
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He does recognize that his doctrine of grace impacts his doctrine of the church.
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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, well, that's odd, where did he get that?
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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.
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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
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Reformers would very frequently be focusing upon, found in Augustine at this point.
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Now, there are other areas. For example, Augustine's doctrine of scripture and its sufficiency, very much on the
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Reformers' side over against Rome's side at that point. But as far as citations go, you're going to find the
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Reformers very frequently citing Augustine in regards to his views on the doctrines of grace and things like that.
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And I've mentioned before on the program that there's a citation from B .B. Warfield where he said the
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Reformation inwardly considered was nothing more than the victory of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church.
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And so we have the luxury in hindsight of looking back and criticizing
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Augustine and seeing these inconsistencies. Now, we can respond to that in one of two ways.
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We can take the narrow -minded approach, which removes
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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.
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We can get rid of all that. We can take the narrow -minded route that puts him in our own context, says, well, look, since he's wrong about this, this, and this, then
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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.
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That's what happens when you don't allow early church writers to live in a context in which they themselves lived.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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So what do we learn from all this? And we're going to take a break here in a couple of moments, and maybe you have some comments about that or other things at 877 -753 -3341.
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But the point being, what do we learn from this? Well, as I've presented this information down over the past number of years,
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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.
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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 have come before us and try to understand a little bit better the context in which they were in.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Well, that's true. So is it possible to be right in one area and wrong in another area?
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Yep, seems to be. Seems to be. What can we learn from that?
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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.
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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.
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877 -753 -3341 is the phone number. Waiting for you to become part and parcel of the program today.
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877 -753 -3341. We'll be right back. Under the guise of tolerance, modern culture grants alternative lifestyle status to homosexuality.
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Even more disturbing, some within the church attempt to revise and distort Christian teaching on this behavior.
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In their book, The Same -Sex Controversy, James White and Jeff Neal write for all who want to better understand the
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Bible's teaching on the subject, explaining and defending the foundational Bible passages that deal with homosexuality, including
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Genesis, Leviticus, and Romans. Expanding on these scriptures, they refute the revisionist arguments, including the claim that Christians today need not adhere to the law.
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In a straightforward and loving manner, they appeal to those caught up in a homosexual lifestyle to repent and to return to God's plan for His people.
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The Same -Sex Controversy, defending and clarifying the Bible's message about homosexuality. Get your copy in the bookstore at AOMIN .org.
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Answering those who claim that only the King James Version is the Word of God, James White, in his book,
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The King James Only Controversy, examines allegations that modern translators conspired to corrupt scripture and lead believers away from true
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Christian faith. In a readable and responsible style, author James White traces the development of Bible translations, old and new, and investigates the differences between new versions and the authorized version of 1611.
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You can order your copy of James White's book, The King James Only Controversy, by going to our website at www .aomin
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.org. What is Dr. Norman Geisler warning the Christian community about in his book, Chosen but Free, A New Cult, Secularism, False Prophecy Scenarios?
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No, Dr. Geisler is sounding the alarm about a system of beliefs commonly called Calvinism. He insists that this belief system is theologically inconsistent, philosophically insufficient, and morally repugnant.
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In his book, The Potter's Freedom, James White replies to Dr. Geisler, but The Potter's Freedom is much more than just a reply.
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It is a defense of the very principles upon which the Protestant Reformation was founded. Indeed, it is a defense of the very gospel itself.
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In a style that both scholars and laymen alike can appreciate, James White masterfully counters the evidence against so -called extreme
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Calvinism, defines what the Reformed faith actually is, and concludes that the gospel preached by the
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Reformers is the very one taught in the pages of scripture. The Potter's Freedom, a defense of the
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Reformation and a rebuttal to Norman Geisler's Chosen but Free. You'll find it in the Reformed Theology section of our bookstore at aomin .org.
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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.
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But it doesn't really matter because it sounds like I'm going to be singing the rest of the program in an
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English accent. Oh, I hear
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Hark! I hear rich upon the phone on the other side of the wall. All I had to do was mention my
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English accent and mention singing at the same time, and immediately those folks who love us and care for us and...
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I'm really looking at the possibility of getting over to London in March of next year.
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And if I do that, I'm telling you something, the next number of Dividing Lines will all be done in an
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English accent. How could I not? If I go to London and I get to hear it and experience it, then
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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.
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So I don't see any notification from anybody. It's probably a telemarketer calling or something like that.
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That would not be a bad thing. Oh, oh, oh, okay. Nothing like a controversial topic to address today.
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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
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English accent. I can almost guarantee you that is not how Jonathan is spelled.
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I don't think I've ever seen Jonathan spelled that way. But that's okay. Jonathan in South Florida.
35:57
Hello, Jonathan. 877 -753 -3341. You got to turn the feed off there, bro, because you're not going to...
36:05
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.
36:13
Calling 101. Turn the volume down. Especially, you know, on radio programs, there's only a seven -second delay.
36:20
Isn't that fun when you hear that? When we go to Jonathan in South Florida. One, two, three, seven seconds there.
36:27
Hi! Hi! Turn the radio down. Okay, just a second. Then you hear them... It's a lot of fun.
36:35
But that's even worse in IRC. Not IRC, but on this, because you can hear me. Oh, okay.
36:41
We have it turned down. We're listening to the right thing now. All righty. Hey, Jonathan. Hey. Hey. There you go.
36:48
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.
36:54
Yeah, it was really messing me up. Oh, yeah. Hey, you sound like you're on exit, too. Yes, I do.
37:00
Yes. Where are you from? Well, I'm originally from England. I am from England. Oh, yes, from England.
37:06
Oh, jolly. That's good. I thought you'd like my accent. I love it. It just automatically brings it out in me.
37:16
Do you know we don't have any sidewalks here in America? Isn't that silly? That's horrendous. Okay, I'm sorry,
37:24
Jonathan. What was your question, anyway? Okay, my question was just in regards to research in church history.
37:30
I remember listening to a teaching of yours once, and you were saying how that the medieval church era wasn't as dark as so many people think.
37:41
But as I'm getting prepared to teach church history myself, and when I've studied that era of time,
37:48
I found it dark when I was studying it. I didn't see a lot of gospel light.
37:55
I was wondering how do you study church history? Because I find it quite difficult because some of the history books
38:02
I'm reading, it's from a secular perspective, and you're getting a secular philosophy, if you will, on the period of church history.
38:10
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.
38:19
So really, you start digging into that kind of stuff, and I think
38:24
I know what you're talking about Were you talking about the files on the
38:30
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
38:43
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
38:51
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.
39:08
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.
39:23
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.
39:30
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 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.
40:00
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.
40:11
There were still some areas of light, and the only reason to answer your question,
40:18
I took a specialty graduate class on the subject of the Renaissance, and of course those specialty books then that go into the
40:26
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.
40:37
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 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.
41:31
You find them in the more specialized stuff. So there's a huge, huge amount of information out there, and one of the things that bothers me in my own life right now is that I'm so busy writing and traveling that I don't get a chance to read nearly as much as I used to, and I think
41:49
I'm going to need to take a year off or something just to read and catch up on stuff sometime in the not -too -distant future because that's where you dig that kind of stuff up.
41:59
So it's there, and it's not necessarily in the Internet. A lot of us have gotten to the point where we think everything's in the
42:08
Internet now. It's not really. There's still something really neat about being surrounded by all sorts of paper books.
42:14
It's not as easy to find stuff. It takes a longer period of time, but it is there if you just know where to look for it, and sometimes some of the best stuff,
42:21
I wasn't looking for it. Just last night, there was a certain blog out there that was saying some things about Jerome, and one of the last things that was said to me was, well,
42:33
I had failed to give any evidence of Jerome being influenced by his traditions, and I wasn't even thinking about that at that particular point in time.
42:41
Instead, I'm starting to do some reading for the debate coming up next month, re -familiarizing myself with all the information on the
42:48
Apocrypha, and so I had J .N .D. Kelly's book on Jerome sitting on my desk, and so I just opened it up, and just my eyes fell on the page, and voila, it just happened to be where the author was discussing
43:03
Jerome's work on the Vulgate, and he just happened to say exactly what had been said
43:09
I had failed to document, and so I just popped back onto the blog, opened the book up, typed out a little paragraph that gave that information, and went on from there.
43:18
So sometimes you find this stuff, and you weren't even looking for it.
43:23
You're looking for something else, and you run across it, and so keeping good notes, maybe on a palm pile at your computer, or just note cards or whatever, that can be very, very helpful down the road when you don't even know why this information would be interesting to you or important, but you find it later, and so that's one way of doing it.
43:45
Well, thank you very much for your teaching on church history. Oh, well, hey, you know, I just try to make it interesting because it was.
43:52
I think it's terrible when people teach on that subject. When I taught at Grand Canyon, I would see the students coming in.
43:59
They could take it as a required class, and they're just sort of like, here we are again, you know how students are with required classes, and part of my personal goal was to have them excited about the subject before the semester was over, and it's not all that easy to do, to be perfectly honest with you.
44:16
I mean, let's face it. Some of the stuff in the medieval period is hard to get people overly excited about, but I felt like I had sort of succeeded if I could see at the end of the semester people who had just wandered in, really not looking forward to this.
44:31
One of the films which I would show toward the end of the semester, because we went basically up to the Reformation, was
44:37
The Radicals, and I don't know if you've seen The Radicals or not. If you haven't, it's well worth renting if you can track it down someplace.
44:45
It's the story of Michael Sattler, and if you want to feel some of the tension that is part and parcel of the
44:56
Reformation, what you do is you go get Martin Luther, and believe it or not, I'm going to shock everybody, but I still haven't seen the
45:03
Martin Luther movie yet. I didn't get a chance to see it. I'm waiting for it to come out on DVD, and I don't think it has yet.
45:09
I think it's been delayed or something like that. But there was an excellent Martin Luther movie made back in the, oh,
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I don't know, mid-'80s by the BBC. By the
45:21
BBC? By the BBC. It was called Martin Luther Heretic. You might be able to find it, and the rest of us could, yeah?
45:28
Yeah, you go. You go on the telly and say, hey, I'm going to talk to the baby, say. And so you might be able to track it down easier than the rest of us.
45:36
But watch Martin Luther Heretic, and then watch
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The Radicals, because what that will do is you watch Martin Luther Heretic, and you're like, oh, wow, that's great.
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Stand up there before Charles and say, Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht unter Gott helfen mir.
45:57
And, ooh, yeah, great. And then you watch The Radicals, and you realize that there was something else going on, and that, in fact,
46:07
Luther, within eight years of standing before the emperor, willing to lose his life for what he believed, within eight years he was willing to see the governmental authorities in Lutheran lands use the death penalty against Anabaptists.
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And you go, mm, that's uncomfortable. I'm not sure
46:29
I like that. And so you put the two of them together, and it's an excellent show, shall we say.
46:36
So The Radicals and Martin Luther Heretic. And like I said, when I track down the
46:44
Luther movie, once it comes out, someone on the channel just said it's due out in July. Then maybe I can make some comments on that one, too.
46:50
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate all your insight there. All right. Thank you, sir. Thank you. God bless. Bye -bye.
46:56
God bless. What's that British man doing in South Florida? Anyways, I think there's an invasion going on.
47:03
All right. Let's go up to Salt Lake City and talk with Mike.
47:09
Hello, Mike. Hello. Hello. Hello, Mike. How are you? I'm okay.
47:15
I'm not British. So why are you talking in an accent? I don't know.
47:22
It's because it's better than singing in it, don't you think? Okay. I guess if you want a big lecture of two evils kind of thing, that can explain it.
47:32
A little moral relevancy there, eh? Right. You have to take ethics classes, don't you?
47:39
I've managed to duck out of most of those, thankfully. It would be pretty sad in a secular university, wouldn't it?
47:46
Don't even get me started. Oh. Well, I need to get you started because you're sounding sort of tired.
47:52
Yeah. Yeah. I wonder why that is. You know, well, the blessings of the
47:59
Internet, I'm not about to deny them because they've been very influential in my life. And I remember even when
48:04
I visited Al Martin's church, being told that they get emails from all around the world of gratitude from people who just happen to stumble on their sermons or anything like that.
48:13
Right. But at the same time, with a lot of that stuff going on lately, it seems as though people are managing to band together because on the
48:23
Internet, everybody has a voice, regardless of how much one actually knows or how deserving one should be of that voice.
48:32
And it's having an impact on things that I've been noticing. Like, there's a change in the church, and people are becoming theologians that are not theologians in any sense of the term, and yet they don't seem to notice, and they just blather on.
48:48
And what kind of impact do you think this could end up having? Because it seems as though there's very little discussion of sin from a lot of these people that are becoming more and more vociferous.
49:04
And, of course, there's a tendency of people who are unconverted to pick and choose whatever teachers they want to hear.
49:12
And so you can end up with a mass popularity and large followings of people who otherwise would have never been published.
49:21
And you have an entire shift in power. Well, you have an entire shift in available – well, let's put it this way.
49:30
You have a shift in what people are hearing, and I guess that would result in a shift in power if a person was looking for power.
49:38
But there are similarities historically to what took place when the printing press was invented.
49:45
I mean, there were a lot of folks who didn't like the fact that the printing press was invented because it, in essence, on a smaller scale in comparison to today, did exactly what we're talking about here.
50:00
It gave a voice to people that the people in control didn't want to have given a voice.
50:06
I mean, that's why the Church was so very much – the Roman Church was so very much opposed to this is because the reformers utilized that mechanism to get their message out.
50:17
Now we're in a situation where it's become so ubiquitous and so fast that someone can think up something really stupid and they can spread their stupid idea in a matter of moments, quite literally, through the
50:35
Internet, if they've developed an audience through other means. And what that's done, really,
50:42
I think, is – I don't think the answer is in controlling that. There's nothing we can do about it anyways.
50:47
But what it requires of the Church is a tremendous increase in our discernment and in the need for us to teach our people to have discernment, not only as to what they expose themselves to, but the fact of the matter is we can't control some of the level of exposure.
51:12
It's just simply going to be out there. It's going to be in emails. It's going to be in things that we see. And therefore, our people need to be instructed concerning the necessity of thinking in a
51:26
Christian way, in a way that gives them the capacity and the ability to discern truth from error, much more so than when they were in a situation where information would not be so quickly disseminated.
51:44
For example, this ABC stuff with Peter Jennings. There's nothing in this stuff that is being thrown out there that I didn't run into in seminary.
51:55
There's really nothing new about this form of liberalism and what it says about the alleged conflicts between Paul and Peter and Paul and James and Paul and the
52:07
Jerusalem apostles. There's nothing that I hadn't had to read and study and deal with when
52:14
I was in seminary. But what's happening is the books that I was reading were not only outrageously expensive and outrageously boring, but they just weren't generally available to people in the
52:26
Church. Now, you take that information and you popularize it and you stick it with stupid rock music and music video type stuff, and Peter Jennings throws it out there, and all of a sudden the stuff that used to be in the purview primarily of liberalism and in the seminaries is now stuff that your average churchgoer is running into at the grocery store, is running into in the library, etc.
52:54
And so, all of a sudden, there is a whole new area that we need to be dealing with and we can either basically be depressed about it and say, there's never enough time in the day, here's another battle, yada yada yada, or we can see it as another challenge and trust that the
53:15
Lord is going to give us the strength and the courage and the consistency and the stick -to -itiveness to work through the challenge and that as a result, he's going to grow his people and he's going to sanctify his people and increase their knowledge of the truth, and so on and so forth.
53:32
And it's easy for me to look at it in the negative. It's easy for me to just roll my eyes and go, oh, does it ever end, type of a situation.
53:44
But I also recognize that over and over again in my own life, I've seen the Lord utilize these types of things to really bless his people and to grow his people, and so there you go from there.
53:58
So I think it's a matter of discernment. We can't get rid of it. We can't change it. We can't muzzle the people that you rightly recognize are addressing things they shouldn't address.
54:08
We should talk a little bit more about how important it is to understand what James said. Let not many of you become teachers, for you have the stricter judgment.
54:19
At least at this point, I can sort of go, I've tried to be consistent here because of the fact that when
54:27
Dave Hunt started talking about writing his book, What Love Is This?, I was one of those folks, and I can prove it.
54:35
I wrote to him, and I said, look, if you write Christian books, you have responsibility to those who are going to read it, and you should not write this book.
54:46
From what you said to me on the air, from the position you took at that time, you should not write this book.
54:52
So at least I was consistent at that point in saying, look, you have responsibility once you put yourself in print.
54:57
Well, I think the same thing is true electronically. Once you put yourself out there, you are taking responsibility for what you're saying.
55:06
And so there should be much more of a discussion of that. The problem is, in most evangelical churches, let's face it, the idea is, hey, as long as you say
55:16
Jesus three times, God's pleased with what you're saying and what you're doing. That's what worship is all about. We're all free to just do whatever we want and worship, yada, yada, yada.
55:25
So it's hard to all of a sudden change all that and say, well, actually, we were wrong about that. God is concerned about his worship, and he's concerned about his truth.
55:33
So there's a need for consistency on our part on that level, too. Well, you mentioned the printing press, and obviously that had a lot of positive benefits from our perspective because it got to the point where you couldn't just burn
55:45
Luther like you could Tyndale or the others because his ideas had disseminated to the point where it wouldn't really matter if they had.
55:53
But at the same time, it still had the side effects like the peasant revolt, which were unintended and a complete misunderstanding of what the
56:01
Reformation was about. I mean, it wasn't even based on religion. It was just like an excuse for anarchy. And at the same time, there are these unintended consequences of the
56:11
Internet that I never foresaw. Like, I've seen a blending of secular scholarship and church scholarship, and that's really disturbing.
56:21
Like, I heard the term reification being used in a chat room, a Christian one, and that disturbed me to no end because I'd only heard that in the social sciences before, and it's basically more or less a meaningless term, meaning just like something intangible becomes tangible in a sense.
56:40
It's kind of strange, and nobody ever really defines it that well. But it's just this vague pseudo -scholarship, frankly.
56:50
When people just sit there, and they're like, oh, I have this piece of paper, and it says the following words on it, so therefore
56:55
I must be smart. I mean, that's worthless. And yet that's what people are using side by side with people who aren't trained in any sense, who go out and read like a couple of books on something, and then they all but ordain themselves.
57:11
And it's just this strange blend to watch everybody hold hands and then argue against any kind of objectivism or something like that.
57:18
I know. I understand the frustration, but, you know, and I don't always live consistently in light of what
57:26
I'm about to say myself, but, you know, time tests everything.
57:33
And I think back just a few years ago at folks who were at that time taking a lot of my thoughts and my attention, and you know what?
57:42
They're not around anymore. Or if they are, that time is exposing them for what they were.
57:52
Eventually you get down to the point where you have to recognize that, you know what? The Lord's going to take care of His people.
57:59
And it's easy for me, and I'm trying to fight this, but it's easy for me to get into a wrong mindset about this.
58:05
Instead, I really need to pray the Lord will give me that kind of mindset that says, look, you need to see these as challenges, opportunities of service, and knowing the
58:15
Lord's still in control of all of it. And He certainly is. So, hey, Mike, thank you for your phone call today.
58:20
And I don't know if you were just calling to keep me from doing the British accent and singing, but it was a good call anyways, and important things to talk about.
58:28
And, yes, next March, put it on your calendar. When I come back from London, we'll do the entire dividing line in a British accent.
58:33
It'll be wonderful. It'll be true to form. It'll be great. It'll be fun. And we won't do it Thursday night at 4 o 'clock
58:40
Mountain Standard Time, which is 7 o 'clock Eastern Daylight Time. But be here anyways. See you then.